Scottish Doctor, author, speaker, sceptic

What causes heart disease part forty-eight (48)

A year ago, I wrote a blog suggesting that lead – as in the element – could have caused/causes a great deal of cardiovascular disease. I went further, to propose that the removal of lead as an additive in petrol (gasoline) may have been responsible for a significant percentage of the decline in cardiovascular disease in the Western World, over the last forty or fifty years.

Last week a paper was published suggesting that excess lead was responsible for as many deaths as smoking 1. So, there you go, it turns out I was right. Once again. Yes, yes, I know, Nobel prize on the way. Or perhaps not.

In fact, what cheered me most about this study is that my hypothesis that endothelial damage is the trigger for CVD, was strongly supported. Some time ago I set about looking for factors/things that were capable of damaging the endothelial cells that line arteries. I tend to do this by going to Google and typing in the words endothelial damage ‘and’ copper, or lead, or mercury, or glucose, or smoking, or sickle cell anaemia etc. etc.

Then I see what pops up. At which point I switch to PubMed to look for the associated papers in the area. As it turned out when you hit lead and endothelial damage there was not a great deal, but it is fascinating, and it is clear that lead does damage endothelial cells, in various ways. It also damages many other things in the body – but that is another story.

This relatively unstructured searching system is how I ended up looking at chelation therapy. This form of treatment is/was supposed to remove heavy metals, such as lead, from the body. I had written it off as ‘woo-woo medicine’ (a phrase I actually hate, but I thought it was appropriate here). So, you use drain cleaner in arteries and this makes you better. Yes, right, pull the other one. Bong, next.

Oh well, you live and learn. Turns out that chelation actually works2.

The second thing about the latest paper demonstrating the impact of lead on CVD is that the endothelial damage conjecture had proven ‘predictive’. The best scientific hypotheses are those you can use to predict what is going to happen in the future or better explain the facts of what happened in the past.

As an example of a good predictive hypothesis, we know that if we stand in a specific place, at a specific time, we will see an eclipse of the sun. We know this because we have been told that it will happen by people, who get this right 100% of the time.

If, on the other hand, someone says global temperature will rise by two degrees in the next twenty years, and it does not, we should be rightly sceptical that the scientists predicting this have got their ideas properly nailed down. We should also be sceptical when people alter their hypothesis to fit the facts. Global Warming has become Climate Change. Which some, like me, would say has changed their hypothesis from one that can be disproven, to one that cannot. ‘We predicted the Climate would change, and look it has. Told you so.’

‘Well gee whizz that was just so extremely helpful. Thanks.’

Anyway, to get back to endothelial damage. My conjecture is that, if you can find a factor that damages the endothelium, you will find that it increases the risk of CVD. It is not enough to say that most things that damage the endothelium increase the risk of CVD, or that almost everything that damages the endothelium increases the risk of CVD. It has to be everything.

There are, of course, provisos. We know that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. We also know that some people who smoke never get lung cancer. So, on an individual basis, there can be protective things going on. Ergo, I would not expect everything that causes endothelial damage to cause CVD, in everyone.

Equally, we know that the tuberculous bacillus causes TB. However, not everyone that is exposed to the bacillus gets TB. We also know that people who carry the gene for CCR5 delta 32 mutation cannot be infected with HIV or Ebola. Why not? Because their cells do not code for the protein that allows these viruses to gain entry to cells. Just thought I would throw that one in. I am not just interested in CVD, you know.

In reality, there is almost nothing that is both necessary and sufficient to cause disease, or death – in everybody. Some people have survived falling out of aeroplanes without a parachute. Not many, but it has happened. Ebola kills up to 80% of those it infects, but some survive.

So, what I spend a lot of time doing is attempting to establish is whether or not endothelial damage is ‘necessary’ for CVD to develop [not that it is sufficient in everyone]. Or as someone told me on the blog ‘If and only if.’ As in, CVD will develop if, and only if, endothelial damage has occurred.

So, are there contradictions to the endothelial damage hypothesis? Well, if there are, I have yet to find them. Which does not mean that they do not exist. The closest I have come to a contradiction is with thalidomide. Everyone has heard of this drug, and the terrible malformations it caused. I suspect not many people know why it caused limb malformations.

It is because it interferes with the production and growth of endothelial cells. Because these cells did not grow and develop, blood vessels did not develop and grow in the unborn child, so there was no blood supply to support limb growth. So, the limbs were terribly shortened. I suspect that if thalidomide had been given at an earlier stage of the pregnancy the heart, brain, lungs etc. would have failed to develop and the foetus would have been non-viable – with spontaneous abortion.

Because thalidomide interferes with the formation of new blood vessels (angiogenesis) it is now used to treat cancer, and leprosy, and a few other things as well. Cancers need their own blood supply to grow, and if you stop them triggering new blood vessel growth and development the shrivel up and die. At least, that is the plan.

Other drugs have been developed to stop angiogenesis. One of the first was Avastin. Technically, it is a Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) inhibitor. It inhibits the growth of new endothelial cells. It is also widely used in macular degeneration, where the growth of new blood vessels in and around the macula (the main bit of the retina you use to see with), destroys the vision.

Unfortunately, Avastin has a significant adverse effect. You can probably guess what it is. Yes, it increases atherosclerotic plaque growth, and significantly increases the risk of death from CVD. In high doses, over two years, up to a 1,200% increase in heart attacks3.

Now thalidomide is not exactly the same as Avastin, but it definitely has a negative impact on endothelial cells in some way. But I can find no evidence for thalidomide increasing CVD risk. I can find evidence that, if you give thalidomide to pregnant animals, they too demonstrated limb deformity in offspring. However, if you give Viagra this eliminates the deformity. So, we know that inhibition of nitric oxide (NO) must be a key mechanism of endothelial dysfunction with thalidomide.

Therefore, it should increase CVD risk. Does it, or does it not? Well, you can read this paper ‘Apoptotic signaling induced by immunomodulatory thalidomide analogs in human multiple myeloma cells: therapeutic implications.’4 And try to decide if it does, or it does not. Personally, I cannot figure it out at all. I am kind of hoping that it does, or else my theory is in danger of hitting the waste bin.

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347 thoughts on “What causes heart disease part forty-eight (48)”

Malcolm thank very much. A very thoughtful post which is indeed food for thought.

1: Could we simply say that lead almost always causes endothelial damage and thus cardio vascular disease ?

2: :”Chelation therapy works”, it is not woo woo science…When I checked out this soem while back, it seemed that chelation did indeed remove metals from the system. But I wonder if it removes all of them or just the damaging ones ? There are metals that we do need in our bodies. Magnesium is necessary but a metal; so too is Calcium. And we need others like Iron, Zinc and Copper etc in small amounts. So I wonder if chelation may be a bit of a shot gun approach.
NOTE to all : I am open to correction on this if there is better information available.

A separate query : I assume the ‘it’ you refer to here “… therefore, it should increase CVD risk.”… is Thalidomide and not Viagra. But that is not clear.

By the way of a segway on Viagra, Citrulline Malate also promotes NO in the arteries and is available as an over the counter supplement. It is popular now among the gym jock cognoscent but I suspect it may be good for folks with CVD issues. . I think technically it is converted into L-Arginine in the gut & then absorbed, going on to have this effect. Cheaper & much more readily available. A complete win/win

Eric, spending more time in a sauna leaves less time for indulging in bad activities.https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150223122602.htm
Sauna use associated with reduced risk of cardiac, all-cause mortality
“Compared with men who reported one sauna bathing session per week, the risk of SCD was 22 percent lower for 2 to 3 sauna bathing sessions per week and 63 percent lower for 4 to 7 sauna sessions per week. The risk of fatal CHD events was 23 percent lower for 2 to 3 bathing sessions per week and 48 percent lower for 4 to 7 sauna sessions per week compared to once a week. CVD death also was 27 percent lower for men who took saunas 2 to 3 times a week and 50 percent lower for men who were in the sauna 4 to 7 times a week compared with men who indulged just once per week. For all-cause mortality, sauna bathing 2 to 3 times per week was associated with a 24 percent lower risk and 4 to 7 times per week with a 40 percent reduction in risk compared to only one sauna session per week.”

A vet was asked, how is it that animals can drink really dirty water that would make a human very sick, but not get sick themselves? He replied that animals have a much stronger immune system than humans, they need it for survival in the wild.

Martin, I think that indicates vets have limited knowledge too. My opinion is doge and everything else apart from guinea pigs and primates make their own vitamin C at the required rate to deal with toxins. So they by and large stay healthy, until medicated by a vet.

Bill in Oz: You are correct that chelation removes the good along with the bad, but it is not difficult to replenish the good, and this may be a standard part of the therapy. Chelation has been used for decades, at least here in the U.S., for frank heavy-metal poisoning. It is the standard of care, as is HBOT for the bends (and which has many benefits in PTSD, as well).

If chelation therapy works, perhaps we should expect a patent application from Monanto for the use of glyphosate in chelation therapy. Instead of people having to self-medicate by spraying it on crops then eating the crops, they could cut out the “middle man” and just drink it.

AH Notepad, re glyphosate as medicine: more research needs to be done.
Glyphosate’s effect on corn is impressive, eliminates most of the minerals. Could not find any reference on chelating lead, but should affect all metals. Maybe the introduction of Roundup is responsible for the CVD rates to plummet. No medicine (or poison) is without side effects.

Andy S, if glyphosate had any effect on CVD, that would be one thing, but it has probably affected nutrition. It’s action of chelating the metals in the soil is the principal mechanism of its starving the plants of nutrients, and if the plants can’t get nutrients, nor can we.

For independent, (not industry), information on glyphosate as a chelator, one needs to obtain the publicaly available six paper series “glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases…” by Anthony Samsel and Stephenie Seneff. The authors discuss the chelation ability of glyphosate with essential minerals and how it prevents absorption by the body. For example with manganese, small amounts are needed by the human body, but glyphosate binds to the Mn in the soil, then being taken up by the crops, and prevents absorption leading to a host of chronic diseases. Ironically, glyphosate allows accumulation of Mn in the brain stem leading to PD and prion diseases. Perhaps glyphosate will bind to lead in various parts of the body and deposit the lead in the brain stem.

In addition to the damaging effects as a chelator, glyphosate has also been patented as an antibacterial. Not only does it kill the necessary bacteria in the soil making it sterile, it also kills the gut bacteria. Glyphosate is N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine, a synthetic analog of the essential amino acid glycine. The body tries to incorporate glyphosate instead of glycine into protein syntheses, resulting in mis-folded proteins (origami) leading to DNA damage and cancers.

See the paper by Swanson et al., in Journal of Organic Systems, 9(2), November 2014 for an association of this chronic toxin, glyphosate, with 21 chronic deadly diseases.

Sci-reader, thank you for the explanation of glyphosate’s operation method. I doubt TPTB will do anything about it and its adverse effects. It will probably encourage as part of Agenda 21 (depopulation).

many thanks for your great work … please keep sticking your head above the parapet!

please would you comment on the following….?
“…… latest research suggests the primary way statins reduce heart risk is apparently not by changing HDL and LDL levels in the blood. Instead, cardiologists suspect that statins work through their beneficial effects on diseased artery walls rather than in the blood itself.

Hi Dr K – was interested to hear you interviewed on the NourishBalanceThrive podcast which led me to read this blog and comments – do statins have any pros (that would outweigh the cons) in stabilising arterial walls in people with moderate to high coronary calcium scores ? no other risk factors except the connections you made to clotting/asthma/etc etc in the podcast – thanks for all your efforts

…chelating agents are used to remove toxic heavy metals(e.g. lead, iron, mercury) from the body and in the process unclog plaqued up arteries?

I thought that arterial plaque consisted primarily of calcium, cholesterol, lp(a) and fibrin/fibrinogen, So why should chelation therapy remove all this? Or are toxic metals a large component of plaque,as well as a cause of damage triggering the repair process?

I wonder how my GP will respond to my queries about chelation therapy?

My 75 yr old mum was getting chelation therapy in a closet-like back room with 6 other people, 2 of whom were MDs, who braved a 2+hr drive for the sessions, both confessed they would not/could not recommend CT to their patients. Their medical society would fine/disbar them. CT is un-patented, so no bigPharma bucks are to be made;it works,so no lifelong drug $ubjugation;no friendly fire side effects, so no teams of caregivers to ‘manage’ the harm incurred. BTW, mum had gangrene in her foot, with 50% circulation in the leg, & after only 3 visits, CT shockingly transformed that grey/purple/distended foot into a glowing pink one…

2.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4110867/ :
“Oral immunomodulatory drugs (IMiDs), namely thalidomide, lenalidomide and pomalidomide, interfere with several pathways important for disease progression. Today they play a crucial role in the treatment of multiple myeloma patients, and have considerably improved myeloma outcomes. These agents, and thalidomide in particular, are associated with higher rates of thromboembolic events, both venous and arterial. Individual risk factors for thromboembolic events include advanced age, previous history of thromboembolism, an indwelling central venous catheter, comorbid conditions (e.g. infections, diabetes, cardiac disease, obesity), current or recent immobilization, recent surgery and inherited thrombophilic abnormalities. Cancer therapy and cancer itself also increase the risk of thromboembolic events. The aim of this review is to help clinicians to define the risk of thrombotic events in patients treated with thalidomide and thus to provide practical recommendations to manage thromboprophylaxis in these patients.”

What causes endothelial damage and CVD? Since the endothelium is composed of cells the question should be: how does lead, thalidomide or other insult damage a cell? Damaged cells will result in damaged endothelium, neurones, monocytes, muscle tissue etc.. The effect on the mitochondria is a key factor.

http://www.jimmunol.org/content/172/8/5103.long
Thalidomide Induces Apoptosis in Human Monocytes by Using a Cytochrome c-Dependent Pathway
“Our data suggest that the well-known anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive effects of thalidomide on human monocytes and macrophages are at least partially mediated by the induction of apoptosis involving a cytochrome c-dependent pathway

Although the present data clearly demonstrate that thalidomide induces apoptosis by a cytochrome c- and caspase-dependent pathway, our results do not exclude additional mechanisms of thalidomide action. As TNF-α exerts anti-apoptotic effects on human monocytes (39), inhibition of this mediator by thalidomide might exert proapoptotic effects. It has also been shown that thalidomide is capable of suppressing TNF-induced NF-κB activation, which therefore may also play a role in monocyte apoptosis evoked by thalidomide (40).
A serious disadvantage of treatment with thalidomide is given by the well-known side effects, especially teratogenicity, peripheral neuropathy, and sedation that is commonly observed (41).”

Climate change is simply a more accurate description. See levels will rise, for example, but there are actually places where the sea level will fall. Complex phenomena are like that. I’m really surprised given how you accept science in health that you don’t accept Co2 and the green house effect. Co2 has risen in the same way you can measure blood pressure. Where is the room for agnosticism? The science here as for more clear than anything related to heart disease.

Most people believe that the ‘cholesterol hypothesis’ is absolutely true, with no room for argument. Anyone who believes there is no room for agnosticism, or doubt, in science – is not a scientist. All hypotheses should be continuously attacked. When someone involved in climate science says that the ‘science is settled’ or words to that effect – I make a judgement about them. Too many people involved in Climate science simply mock anyone who disagrees with them as an ill-informed flat-earther, or in the pay of big business. That, again, is not a sign of confidence in their position. I see all the same games played with the ‘experts’ in the cholesterol hypothesis. Mock, attack, ignore and the worst sign of all making an appeal to authority. ‘All scientists agree.’ Or ‘All reasonable scientists agree.’ or words to that effect. Most scientists always agree with each-other. Often in support of hypotheses that are utter bunk.

Todd Hoff: Read climate science. Two good sources are Climate, etc. and What’s Up With That. Climate is immensely complex, and it is true that nobody really knows the impact increased greenhouse gases have had on the warming in the 20th Century. The IPPC sometimes does science, and sometimes does politics.

Your reply is typical for a denier. Arrogant in assuming I haven’t read climate science. Content and fact free. Check. Relying on whataboutism and innuendo. Check. To imply we don’t know how green house gasses work is farscicle. You might as well be the sugar council telling me sugar science is complex, we just don’t know enough about it yet.

Todd Hoff: There is no point in responding to what you’ve posted, except to say this. Dr. Judith Curry (Climate, etc.) is both one of the U.S.’ top climate scientists, and one of our most respected women scientists. For nearly two years I have read every blog post of hers and her guests, plus many of the links to other scientific papers. Do this yourself, if you’re interested. Then we can have a conversation, as long as you refrain from personal attacks and political speech. Reality is complex.

Indeed. But you cannot break down a hypothesis when it cannot be disproved. Climate change is now perfectly immunised against refutation. On that basis, Popper would call it non-science. To turn this around, can you think of any prediction made by climate scientists which, were it not to happen, would refute the Climate change hypothesis.

Some years ago I also turned to the agnostic view regarding the global warming issue especially when having looked into the historic records of the temperatures changes during a number of the recent ice ages.

The mocking “Climate denier” acquisition from the proponents here takes the “price of stupidity”, especially when they claim “overwhelming” scientific evidence or worse to “scientific
consensus”. As you point out the climate issue has the same smell as the “cholesterol hypothesis”. Stupidity reigns with a purpose!

To me “climate change” now seems to be only about international politics.

When it comes to science, or most things, I look for the language used – or the techniques used to support various hypotheses. ‘We are not certain.’ Is always a good sign. ‘Our best hypothesis at present is…’ that is another good sign.

Once people start to claim that ‘everyone agrees’, or that ‘all reasonable opinion is’, or ‘the overwhelming weight of evidence supports’… Of, we get phrases such as Climate Change deniers, we have moved from science, to politics. At which point, all reasonable scientific discussion becomes – if not impossible – then extremely difficult.

The other giveaway, that a hypothesis may not be as strong as it should, is when people becoming very angry and insulting when anyone challenges their viewpoint. People use anger and insults when they fear that they are wrong, or in the wrong. They attempt to engage in reasonable discussion when they are confident that they are right.

In general, my view is that – when people try to attack you, personally, and shout you down – you are probably right. See under, Vladimir Putin’s response to any and all accusations.

I long ago joined the agnostic camp on climate change. We live in a world which has on a geologic time scale, a very unstable climate : ice sheets grow and retreat; sea levels rise and fall; oxygen, Co2 and other gases in the atmosphere change as a percentage of the whole mix; and atmospheric pressure can also change either becoming more or becoming less.

However we live lives that are comparatively short where change is scary !

I think that every science that doesn’t actually produce something tangible – such as a faster computer chip, or a cure for a disease (as opposed to a preventative) must be suspect nowadays. Institutions – including NASA are paid huge sums of money to research climate change – just as big pharma funds the research it likes. This is the heart of the problem. The only way to perform research like this, is to have two teams, one trying to prove the hypothesis, and the other trying to oppose it.

There is also the problem that science has become bombastic, and uses PR to present its case. As we all know from saturated fat and cholesterol, once it has taken a position, it will not reassess as fresh evidence comes in.

Incidentally, a moment’s thought (or a simple experiment) will demonstrate that greenhouses do not work by stopping heat radiation escaping. They work by stopping heat escaping by convection – warm air rises. A lot of the heat escapes just by opening the doors!

Anyone who thinks that winning a Nobel prize makes one an expert on anything outside one’s field of expertise, think again. These scientists have to focus so long and so deeply on their own narrow field that they don’t have the time to do the necessary research and thinking to get beyond a very shallow understanding of other matters.

Martin, the problem as I see, it is the groups who would have people believe the likes of Giaever are wrong, spend a lot of time contradicting the information such people put out, rather than going throught the points of disagreement, and explaining what they see as the correct version.

There is no doubt in my mind that global warning is nonsense. I have followed the “ story” for the last 10 years and have found it very similar to the situation with statins (and antidepressants, and vaccines….) where a group keeps up the propaganda regardless of any contrary evidence, and refuses to countenance any opposing view.

I recommend a paper by Christopher Booker, a Daily Telegraph journalist, who published it under the auspices of the Global Warming Policy Forum. In it he argues that Global Warming is a perfect example of Group Think an idea put forward by Irving Janis, a professor of psychology at Yale, about 40 years ago. Janis suggest three rules as follows:

The first rule is that a group of people come to share a particular idea or way of looking at the world which seems hugely important to them, but which has not been based on looking properly at all the relevant evidence. So in fact it is just an untested belief, tinged with a strong element of make-believe.

Rule two is that, because they have shut their minds to any evidence which might contradict their belief – as Janis demonstrated in all his case-studies – they need to insist that it is supported by a “consensus” (a word Janis repeatedly emphasised). The one thing supporters of such a consensus cannot allow is that anyone should question it.

His third rule is that, because their belief relies only on looking at evidence which seems to confirm it, they are incapable of debating it properly with those who disagree with it. Instead any contrary views are dismissed with irrational hostility. Those holding them must simply be ignored, sidelined, ridiculed and discredited.

Readers of this blog will recognise these behaviours as characteristics of many of the actions of the medical and pharmaceutical fraternlties. But not Malcolm!!

David Carter: It would be more accurate to say the “official position” or “public narrative” on global warming is nonsense, like the official position on most of what is reported in the media. There is little doubt that the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is a positive thing for life on land, as it has clearly increased (satellite photos confirm this) green biomass, and likely has increased crop yields. And human populations can more easily adapt to, and thrive in, warmer climes than colder. As for the ocean ecosystems, they have adapted to periodic extreme climate fluctuations for millions of years. What we really should be concerned about is the mass poisoning of life on Earth by the chemical industry, particularly Monsanto/Bayer (the latter company was a unit of IG Farben, tried and convicted at Nuremburg), the medical industry, particularly pharmaceuticals, and the U.N./WHO, and their subsidiary EU. The defense industry is small potatoes by comparison. The only solution I can see is to fire all the politicians, throw the banksters in jail, and institute real democracy, which would mean local control and decision-making.

The hypothesis which says “burning fossil fuel -> more CO2 in the atmosphere -> less heat radiated away from Earth -> global warming” can be disproved but has been proven many times over.

– CO2 is increasing, proved by very accurate measurements in Hawaii
– it comes from fossil fuel, proved by isotope analysis of the 13C/14C ratio, which differs in plants and air
– the mass of CO2 is consistent with the estimated tonnage of fossil fuel burnt in modern times
– CO2 has a blanket effect, known for 100 years and confirmed by satellite measurements of incoming and outgoing radiation from Earth
– the only way Earth can gain or lose heat is by radiation, because it is suspended in a vacuum, hence no conduction or convection (ignoring chemical effects, radioactivity etc, which are minor)
– therefore radiant energy in – radiant energy out = increase in heat, by simple maths.

QED.

The real problem is, what effects will global warming have? Because of complex interrelationships, feedback effects, lack of data particularly in the deep ocean, etc, it is not possible to say definitively. But if it looks like being disastrous, perhaps we should start taking action now.

Martin, I’m afraid any action now is millenia too late. The rot set in when population started to increase. When it was stable at a very low level, there was no problem, but once the increase started it was unstainable That is the problem with the concept of “sustainable growth”. It is an oxymoron, sooner or later a limit will be reached. The longer it takes to get to that limit with today’s growth rates, the greater will be the catastrophic change.

JDPatten: Reading climate science at great length (I recommend Climate, Etc.) has convinced me that the alarmist position bandied about by politicians and media is nonsense, like much of what they say and print. Just one example: In 1066 the sea level in Britain was considerably higher than it is today. This is historical fact. In truth, nobody really knows the effect, if any, that greenhouse gases have on the warming which has occurred over the last century and a half or so, as we emerged from the Little Ice Age, which followed the Medieval Warm Period, during which William the Conquerer’s ships landed considerably inland of where the coastline is today, and the Norse colonized Greenland, abandoning it during the LIA.

1066 is almost 1,000 years ago. Do you think the outline of England back then is identical to today? Erosion of highliands, and rivers bringing soil and rock down to the ocean change the coastline. Note that Venice has been around since 400 AD. If the ocean and seas were all that much higher, Venice would have been destroyed. As it is, Venice has been in continuous existence since its beginning.

I think discussions on climate are fascinating. However, I must draw a line under them, as this bog is about CVD and I can see it getting dragged way off track. I would like, at some point, to create a place where people could discuss their views – but not yet.

Mark Sanders: Sea level, its rising and falling, and local tides are an exceedingly complex set of issues due to many factors, and vary widely due to geographical location. I think my point was to pay no attention to prognosticators of doom in regard to future sea levels. Reading climate science has opened a fascinating world for me. It is a realm in which politics and the pursuit of wealth are as rampant as in the medical and pharmaceutical world, and the public is ill-informed, unfortunately.

I fully agree that you do not want (indeed none of us want) to let this blog get diverted from medical matters on to climate change! I’d just like to say that part of the reason why rotten medical science can exist, is that people put far too much trust in modern science. I remember my initial incredulity as I read your book – surely the evidence for cholesterol causing CVD must be overwhelming! It was only all your references to the medical literature that kept me reading – even though I didn’t actually chase any of them up, I felt sure that if the argument in your book had been supported by fake references, you would have been in very hot water with the GMC!

Henry Bauer commented somewhere, that all too often scientists battling to expose bad practice in their speciality, seem to assume everything else in science is just fine. I am glad you do mention Climate Change (and one or two other problem areas of science) from time to time because a general pattern is easier to understand that one isolated area of problematic science.

However, hopefully as people become aware that there are many other areas of rotten science, the incredulity will fade and something might get done about it.

There is yet another scandle dressed up as science in a report about fluoride from PHE (Public Health England)

Fluoridation PHE

Health monitoring report for England 2018

Short lay summary
Background
Tooth decay (dental caries), caused by regularly eating and drinking sugary foods and drinks, is a significant problem for adults and children in England. A quarter of five-yearolds experience tooth decay and around 40,000 children and young people have teeth removed (due to decay) in hospital each year. Fluoride is naturally occurring and likely to be found in drinking water and many foods in varying amounts. It is also added to toothpaste. Less severe tooth decay has been observed in populations whose drinking water contains greater concentrations of fluoride than in populations with low drinking water fluoride concentrations. For this reason, water fluoridation schemes adjust fluoride levels in water supplies in some parts of England in an effort to reduce dental decay.

This Public Health England monitoring report, on behalf of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, compared data on the health of people living in areas of England with differing concentrations of fluoride in their drinking water supply. Dental health
 Five-year-olds in areas with water fluoridation schemes were much less likely to experience tooth decay, and less likely to experience more severe decay than in areas without schemes.
 The chances of having a tooth/teeth removed in hospital because of decay were also much lower in areas with water fluoridation schemes.
 Children from both affluent and deprived areas benefitted from fluoridation, but children from relatively deprived areas benefitted the most.
 Dental fluorosis1 , at a level that may effect the appearance of teeth, was observed in 10% of children/young people examined in 2 fluoridated cities
2 . However, there was no difference between children and young people surveyed in fluoridated and nonfluoridated cities when asked about their opinion on the appearance of their teeth, taking into account concerns which have resulted from any cause (eg poor alignment, decay, trauma or fluorosis).
1 mottling of the teeth as a result of exposure to fluoride, of which fluoridation schemes may contribute
2 Children were surveyed in fluoridated cities (Birmingham, Newcastle) and non-fluoridated cities (Manchester, Liverpool) Short summary
4 Non-dental health outcomes Taken alongside the existing wider research, our results do not provide convincing evidence of higher rates of hip fracture, Down’s syndrome, kidney stones, bladder cancer, or osteosarcoma (a cancer of the bone) due to fluoridation schemes.

Conclusion The findings of this report agree with the view that water fluoridation is an effective and safe public health measure to reduce the frequency and severity of dental decay, and narrow differences in dental health between more and less deprived children and young people.

Effective and safe – surprise surprise NOT.
Having met the people who were behind this report like Prof Newton who was involved in Southampton when he worked for the defunct SHA I have no faith in anything he said. They are all arrogant.
posted by Bill at 9:19 AM | 0 comments links to this post

A response from F.A.N.

Public Health England Makes a Scientific Ass of Itself
On March 22, Public Health England issued a report titled Water Fluoridation. Health monitoring report for England 2018 . It is yet another sham review by a pro-fluoridation government agency.
Public Health England described itself this way:
“Public Health England exists to protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities. We do this through world-leading science, knowledge and intelligence, advocacy, partnerships and the delivery of specialist public health services. We are an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care, and a distinct delivery organisation with operational autonomy. We provide government, local government, the NHS, Parliament, industry and the public with evidence-based professional, scientific and delivery expertise and support.” (page 2)
Public Health England on fluoride and IQ:
“At the time the PHE working group were considering health outcomes, the evidence for an association between lower IQ and fluoride in water was considered weak (22, 24), and there were no quality routine datasets available for analysis. Therefore IQ was not considered a priority health outcome for inclusion.” (page 23)
Comment from FAN:
We recommend our readers re-read these two statements again while listening to a recording of Elgar’s famous Pomp and Circumstance march!
The two references used for this statement* were from outdated rubber-stamp reports from Ireland (2015) and New Zealand (2014) (which we discussed in some detail in a previous bulletin.
It is a hallmark of these government “sham reviews” that they incestuously cite each other – piling propaganda on top of propaganda – but all the while trying to impress with their inflated “authority.” Nowhere, was this clearer than with the NZ review which stressed that Sir Peter Gluckman was the “senior scientific adviser to the Prime Minister of NZ” and Sir David Skegg was the President of The Royal Society of New Zealand. The shock comes when someone who knows the science of the issue actually reads their reports and finds how little they know about the subject.
Of course, neither the authors of these two sham reviews could have considered the Bashash et al., 2017 study (since they were written three years earlier). But was the PHE unaware that this study has been in the works for 12-years and was funded by US government agencies (National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Environmental Protection Agency)? And did none of their distinguished panelists not hear about the study when it was published 7 months ago? Have they not been following the issue of fluoride’s neurotoxicity over the last few years? Were they unaware of the over 300 animal and human studies that indicate that fluoride is neurotoxic, including 52 IQ studies? available online here.
At the very least the PHE should have mentioned the Bashash study which vindicated our concerns and dealt with many of the criticisms of the IQ studies presented in the Irish and NZ reviews, and revised their preposterous notion that, “IQ was not considered a priority health outcome.”
Or do they seriously maintain there is nothing wrong about deliberately adding a neurotoxic substance to drinking water? And to do so without issuing any warnings to pregnant women that fluoride has the potential to lower the IQ of their offspring? The only rational explanation for their cavalier attitude on this matter is that they, along with the health agencies in other fluoridated countries, are more interested in protecting the practice of water fluoridation than protecting the health of the population.
Curiously, Public Health England notes
“It would be interesting to link health effects to a measure of the total daily fluoride intake from all sources or the total dose of fluoride absorbed by each person. This can be estimated by biological monitoring using biological samples for example urine. However, again such total fluoride intake data were not available at a population level. To study the effect of fluoride the exposure assessment has focussed on concentration of fluoride in the water supply. This is the one of the main determinants of how much fluoride people absorb, although we recognise that total intake also depends on factors for which we have no data.” (page 26)
The UK government environment and health agencies and those in other fluoridating countries like Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, have had over 70 years to perfect this (or even attempt to do this) but have failed miserably to do so. Using water concentrations as the biometric of exposure is pathetic considering once fluoride is added to the water you can’t determine dose without knowing how much water people drink and the fluoride they get from other sources. Total dose is the only meaningful biometric for exposure when considering the health of the whole population.
Declan Waugh commenting on the PHE report noted that:
“when they don’t even consider tea as a source of fluoride exposure in the UK (a major tea drinking country), then it’s a worthless pile of garbage. There are 15 studies in the UK that have measured fluoride levels in tea including a number of large studies in the last 5 years.”
As we discussed in yesterday’s bulletin, A Mind is Terrible Thing to Waste:
Available evidence suggests that the following are all associated with IQ reductions: (1) Daily fluoride doses, (2) Urine fluoride levels, (3) Serum fluoride levels, and (4) Dental fluorosis levels. Each of these four metrics of fluoride exposure provide a more direct assessment of individual fluoride exposure than water fluoride concentration and are thus more probative for risk assessment purposes.
The 2017 US government-funded Bashash study certainly highlighted the importance of urine fluoride levels. Note this study followed 300 mother-child pairs and found that urine fluoride levels in the mothers – corresponding to fluoride levels experienced by adults in fluoridated communities in the USA- was associated with a 6 IQ point loss in their offspring.
The PHE report is like a Trump tweet it is a distraction from the “real science” of fluoride’s dangers to human health – particularly the brain. It provides even more incentive to get that “real science” examined in court.
The Rubber Stamp references used to justify inaction on IQ:
22. Sutton M, Kiersey, R., Farragher, L., Long, J. Health Effects of Water fluoridation: An evidence review. Health Research Board (Ireland); 2015.
24. Royal Society of New Zealand and the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor. Health effects of water fluoridation: A review of the scientific evidence. Wellington; 2014.

Cannot read the chelation article.Advert blocks the article.Tried submitting email adress for advertised article and their dumb system( like that of the RSPB) considers my email address invalid! suspect the undrscores.

Leaded petrol was about patented revenue streams – like so much else.
Degrees of susceptibility to toxins varies according to the environmental factors including psychic emotional health or wholeness of being.
I have read enough to consider many infectious vectors of disease operate a cover story for toxic exposures in the context of malnourishment and poverty of psychic-emotional or spiritual health and that this is in no small part associated with private revenue streams or ‘power in the world’.
(over others and at their expense).
Core beliefs operate at the root level of humanity that in effect serve as the ‘operating system’ upon which a parasitical or self-destructive agenda, denatures and toxifies (us) under the aegis of power and protection.
The intent to manually manage life instead of giving faith by living it, is like assuming the ‘power’ to influence the weather; once you secretly take on such ‘power’ you can never release it to the chaos of unprotected fear. This is similar to loss of muscle tone due to non-use. We are so invested in systems that effectively think for us that we have forgotten how to discern or feel our way – or framed this in such distrust as to assign it a negative power.
Blind faith gives without knowing what is is giving – as a sort of program or mind that runs so as not to have to exercise consciousness as a relational act.
As our model for control over life ‘deconstructs’ beneath our feet, we are obliged to change. Even the attempt to not change is a ramping up of model or identity v actual results.
I lean to Stephanie Seneff’s core presumption that the body is always acting to maintain its core functionality (life) under whatever environmental situations of nourishment or toxicity, health or harm. So I also see the human responsibility at the level of our ‘self’ – is of learning to not get in our own way – that is to identify and release beliefs (and behaviours) that effectively block a natural state of communication and result in various ‘symptoms’ according to the pathways of conflict expression. These include persistent habits of displacement or suppressions to a body denied conscious clearing, balancing and appreciation by a threat-defined ‘overmind of control’.
What then is ‘chaos’ if not something to be killed, denied, suppressed and managed as sickness?

I note that following ‘standard of care’ may often further sicken and even kill the patient without attracting blame or penalty under the law, while breaking its code can lead to loss of reputation, career or prison – especially if doing so heals and becomes public. In this sense the foxes run the hen house as an exclusive monopolised proprietary establishment. Even if one facet seems to be conquered or addressed, others come up behind us – because the cause is not being addressed so much as disguised.

Very very interesting! You’ll want to check out fluoride and endothelial damage. Fluoride is even more toxic than lead and only slightly less toxic than arsenic so it’s likely more damaging even than lead. Yet fluoride is purposely added to drinking water. CRAZY!!!
See chart linked below-

Also found in a surprising number of drugs. Very reactive and also displaces chlorine, yet another thing essential in anatomically correct quantities but highly toxic in overdose.. Also likely displaces iodine, as does bromine, I wonder if there is a difference in hypothyroid incidence where the water is flouridated.

Also found in a surprising number of drugs. Very reactive and also displaces chlorine, yet another thing essential in anatomically correct quantities but highly toxic in overdose.. Also likely displaces iodine, as does bromine, I wonder if there is a difference in hypothyroid incidence where the water is fluoridated.

There is a study comparing the Birmingham area (fluoridated) and Manchester (not fluoridated) which showed twice the incidence of thyroid related problems. However Public Idiots England (sorry, that should be “health”) have just released a paper saying there is no difference in absolutely anything you care to mention and that fluoride can only be good for you whatever the circumstances.

REPORT and response from Fluoride Action Network.

Fluoridation PHE

Health monitoring report for England 2018

Short lay summary
Background
Tooth decay (dental caries), caused by regularly eating and drinking sugary foods and drinks, is a significant problem for adults and children in England. A quarter of five-yearolds experience tooth decay and around 40,000 children and young people have teeth removed (due to decay) in hospital each year. Fluoride is naturally occurring and likely to be found in drinking water and many foods in varying amounts. It is also added to toothpaste. Less severe tooth decay has been observed in populations whose drinking water contains greater concentrations of fluoride than in populations with low drinking water fluoride concentrations. For this reason, water fluoridation schemes adjust fluoride levels in water supplies in some parts of England in an effort to reduce dental decay.

This Public Health England monitoring report, on behalf of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, compared data on the health of people living in areas of England with differing concentrations of fluoride in their drinking water supply. Dental health
 Five-year-olds in areas with water fluoridation schemes were much less likely to experience tooth decay, and less likely to experience more severe decay than in areas without schemes.
 The chances of having a tooth/teeth removed in hospital because of decay were also much lower in areas with water fluoridation schemes.
 Children from both affluent and deprived areas benefitted from fluoridation, but children from relatively deprived areas benefitted the most.
 Dental fluorosis1 , at a level that may effect the appearance of teeth, was observed in 10% of children/young people examined in 2 fluoridated cities
2 . However, there was no difference between children and young people surveyed in fluoridated and nonfluoridated cities when asked about their opinion on the appearance of their teeth, taking into account concerns which have resulted from any cause (eg poor alignment, decay, trauma or fluorosis).
1 mottling of the teeth as a result of exposure to fluoride, of which fluoridation schemes may contribute
2 Children were surveyed in fluoridated cities (Birmingham, Newcastle) and non-fluoridated cities (Manchester, Liverpool) Short summary
4 Non-dental health outcomes Taken alongside the existing wider research, our results do not provide convincing evidence of higher rates of hip fracture, Down’s syndrome, kidney stones, bladder cancer, or osteosarcoma (a cancer of the bone) due to fluoridation schemes.

Conclusion The findings of this report agree with the view that water fluoridation is an effective and safe public health measure to reduce the frequency and severity of dental decay, and narrow differences in dental health between more and less deprived children and young people.

Effective and safe – surprise surprise NOT.
Having met the people who were behind this report like Prof Newton who was involved in Southampton when he worked for the defunct SHA I have no faith in anything he said. They are all arrogant.
posted by Bill at 9:19 AM | 0 comments links to this post

F.A.N.

Public Health England Makes a Scientific Ass of Itself
On March 22, Public Health England issued a report titled Water Fluoridation. Health monitoring report for England 2018 . It is yet another sham review by a pro-fluoridation government agency.
Public Health England described itself this way:
“Public Health England exists to protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities. We do this through world-leading science, knowledge and intelligence, advocacy, partnerships and the delivery of specialist public health services. We are an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care, and a distinct delivery organisation with operational autonomy. We provide government, local government, the NHS, Parliament, industry and the public with evidence-based professional, scientific and delivery expertise and support.” (page 2)
Public Health England on fluoride and IQ:
“At the time the PHE working group were considering health outcomes, the evidence for an association between lower IQ and fluoride in water was considered weak (22, 24), and there were no quality routine datasets available for analysis. Therefore IQ was not considered a priority health outcome for inclusion.” (page 23)
Comment from FAN:
We recommend our readers re-read these two statements again while listening to a recording of Elgar’s famous Pomp and Circumstance march!
The two references used for this statement* were from outdated rubber-stamp reports from Ireland (2015) and New Zealand (2014) (which we discussed in some detail in a previous bulletin.
It is a hallmark of these government “sham reviews” that they incestuously cite each other – piling propaganda on top of propaganda – but all the while trying to impress with their inflated “authority.” Nowhere, was this clearer than with the NZ review which stressed that Sir Peter Gluckman was the “senior scientific adviser to the Prime Minister of NZ” and Sir David Skegg was the President of The Royal Society of New Zealand. The shock comes when someone who knows the science of the issue actually reads their reports and finds how little they know about the subject.
Of course, neither the authors of these two sham reviews could have considered the Bashash et al., 2017 study (since they were written three years earlier). But was the PHE unaware that this study has been in the works for 12-years and was funded by US government agencies (National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Environmental Protection Agency)? And did none of their distinguished panelists not hear about the study when it was published 7 months ago? Have they not been following the issue of fluoride’s neurotoxicity over the last few years? Were they unaware of the over 300 animal and human studies that indicate that fluoride is neurotoxic, including 52 IQ studies? available online here.
At the very least the PHE should have mentioned the Bashash study which vindicated our concerns and dealt with many of the criticisms of the IQ studies presented in the Irish and NZ reviews, and revised their preposterous notion that, “IQ was not considered a priority health outcome.”
Or do they seriously maintain there is nothing wrong about deliberately adding a neurotoxic substance to drinking water? And to do so without issuing any warnings to pregnant women that fluoride has the potential to lower the IQ of their offspring? The only rational explanation for their cavalier attitude on this matter is that they, along with the health agencies in other fluoridated countries, are more interested in protecting the practice of water fluoridation than protecting the health of the population.
Curiously, Public Health England notes
“It would be interesting to link health effects to a measure of the total daily fluoride intake from all sources or the total dose of fluoride absorbed by each person. This can be estimated by biological monitoring using biological samples for example urine. However, again such total fluoride intake data were not available at a population level. To study the effect of fluoride the exposure assessment has focussed on concentration of fluoride in the water supply. This is the one of the main determinants of how much fluoride people absorb, although we recognise that total intake also depends on factors for which we have no data.” (page 26)
The UK government environment and health agencies and those in other fluoridating countries like Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, have had over 70 years to perfect this (or even attempt to do this) but have failed miserably to do so. Using water concentrations as the biometric of exposure is pathetic considering once fluoride is added to the water you can’t determine dose without knowing how much water people drink and the fluoride they get from other sources. Total dose is the only meaningful biometric for exposure when considering the health of the whole population.
Declan Waugh commenting on the PHE report noted that:
“when they don’t even consider tea as a source of fluoride exposure in the UK (a major tea drinking country), then it’s a worthless pile of garbage. There are 15 studies in the UK that have measured fluoride levels in tea including a number of large studies in the last 5 years.”
As we discussed in yesterday’s bulletin, A Mind is Terrible Thing to Waste:
Available evidence suggests that the following are all associated with IQ reductions: (1) Daily fluoride doses, (2) Urine fluoride levels, (3) Serum fluoride levels, and (4) Dental fluorosis levels. Each of these four metrics of fluoride exposure provide a more direct assessment of individual fluoride exposure than water fluoride concentration and are thus more probative for risk assessment purposes.
The 2017 US government-funded Bashash study certainly highlighted the importance of urine fluoride levels. Note this study followed 300 mother-child pairs and found that urine fluoride levels in the mothers – corresponding to fluoride levels experienced by adults in fluoridated communities in the USA- was associated with a 6 IQ point loss in their offspring.
The PHE report is like a Trump tweet it is a distraction from the “real science” of fluoride’s dangers to human health – particularly the brain. It provides even more incentive to get that “real science” examined in court.
The Rubber Stamp references used to justify inaction on IQ:
22. Sutton M, Kiersey, R., Farragher, L., Long, J. Health Effects of Water fluoridation: An evidence review. Health Research Board (Ireland); 2015.
24. Royal Society of New Zealand and the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor. Health effects of water fluoridation: A review of the scientific evidence. Wellington; 2014.

Curious. What happens if you give Avastin to pregnant animals? Is it the same effect as thalidimide? Perhaps thalidimide has a another side effect that is protective against heart disease. As in aspirin is protective against heart disease, but other cox inhibitors are not.

The basic form of vitamin d3 cholecalciferol, created just skin surface, permeates through the body before being activated in liver and kidneys,. But in that basic cholecalciferol it provides a signalling modaily that stabilizes the endothelium and inhibits inflammation.
Dietary Vitamin D and Its Metabolites Non-Genomically Stabilize the Endotheliumhttp://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0140370
To keep cholecalciferol (half-life 24hrs in serum) present and freely bioavailable requires sufficient daily dosing/sun exposure to maintain 25(OH)D levels at/above 50ng/ml 125nmol/l.
Vitamin D Inhibits Monocyte/macrophage Pro-inflammatory Cytokine Production by Targeting Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Phosphatase 1https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3368346/
To activate vitamin d requires the presence of magnesium
Role of Magnesium in Vitamin D Activation and Function.http://jaoa.org/article.aspx?articleid=2673882
most people eating modern processed foods do not meet the current low Magnesium RDA.

Thanks for that very useful post. There is no one thing to do in mitigating a disease action. It has to be a system approach, so it appears. Getting enough magnesium is the difficult bit, and knowing you have enough also seems difficult.

AH Notepad: Very easy to get sufficient Mg in the diet. Chocolate and nuts, particularly pumpkin seeds, Brazil nuts and almonds, are rich in it. Also good sources: Hazelnuts, cooked spinach, beet greens, artichokes, shrimp, Parmesan cheese, Sockeye salmon, garlic, avocado, beef, and beets. I get 200-300 mg each day from just the chocolate and nuts I eat (recommended in the U.S. is 360mg/day for women and 420mg/day for men).

Gary, I suggest that saying we can get plenty of magnesium from the list of food you gave, is a bit simplistic. These items may be rich in Magnesium in your part of the world and your own organic garden.
But elsewhere ? That depends on the soil. And in modern farming the soil is mined of minerals and often not replenished.. A specific example : Here in South Australia there are many cropped farming areas with high ph sandy soils over calcrete..I doubt any plants can access the low levels of Magnesium in such soils…

And might CVD be two (or more) different diseases? I’ve been thinking a lot about minerals and metals, and their effect on health. I went to the sawbones a couple of days ago, and told her about the remarkable result of doing the “reduce the body-burden of aluminum” protocol. My balance problems have disappeared, and I have an enhanced feeling of well being. My BP, taken immediately after walking to the room and hoisting up on the table, laughing and chatting with the nurse, arms and legs freely dangling was 134/80, not shabby at all for my age. In the magnesium paper Dr. D says that about 25% of MI’s occur in non-atheroclerotic people, and that Mg deficiency is likely explanatory for some of these. He also says that Mg is critical for endothelial health, and that Al competes with Mg for absorption in the body. So my thinking is that the Al burden, which we all have, may be explanatory for lots of things which haven’t yet been identified. Food for thought, anyway. I printed and stapled a copy of the Mg paper and gave it to my soon-to-be-retired GP. She was pleased, saying she was going read it during her lunch of nuts and chocolate! Thank you, again, Dr. Kendrick, for keeping us on our toes.

Malcolm, I have been reading your blog posts with keen interest and pleasure . . . but I made a new year promise to my wife that not get drawn into the comments on the blog and to concentrate on burgeoning house/garden issues . . . However, this post has me sneaking into my man-cave, and under a cloud of guilt I have to write “What a great informative, thought provoking and entertaining piece you have presented us.”

Very thought provoking post and worrying – I think in a previous blog Dr Kendrick reported/quoted higher incidents of CVD for people living around airports (presumably pollution, noise stress) and I imagine people living next to motorways and busy main roads.

The Lancet article for which Dr Kendrick provided the link mentioned serum blood testing for lead and also urine test for cadmium (they also did a few other health checks).

The good news for those who like to test is that these tests are available (hooray!) e.g. I’ve been to Medichecks website and it’s £69 for blood serum lead test and £59 for cadmium urine test.

Has anyone been down the lead testing (or some other pollutant like cadmium) route previously, perhaps if they live near an airport or source of pollution and suspected this was the reason for their CVD incident?

Jet fuel does not contain lead and never has and is used for jets and turboprops. AVGAS is for smaller planes that have a gasoline engine. Most of it is unleaded or low lead these days.

So if at all, your friendly general aviation airport might give you lead, not the big commercial airport. Airshows with historical planes are a different story. The engines from WW2 need high octane, high lead AVGAS that is usually mixed on site because it is no longer available.

Eric….Think you might be wrong on the ” The engines from WW2 need high octane, high lead AVGAS that is usually mixed on site because it is no longer available.” as I refueled a Spitfire the other day with standard low lead AVGAS that we use for our little Grob Tutors.

Maybe. I was drawing on a wikipedia article on AVGAS, and some anecdotes that the German airforce in WW2 explicitly forbade using airplane fuel for cleaning because even then they were aware of the high toxicity of the added lead.

Meanwhile, I am becoming more flustered about diet. I thought I had it down. Weston Price, a little more low carb than that. But as I am constantly browsing in Cancer World, I keep coming up against what appears to be evidence for not eating this and not eating that. Don’t eat dairy, don’t eat eggs, don’t eat meat, don’t eat saturated fat. Cut out red meat and eggs for six months. I can see doing this for a time and am thinking of doing some sort of vegetable juice or pineapple fast when the weather gets a little warmer. If it ever does.

So this guy, Chris Woollams. He seems very smart, he’s scientific, he got his daughter to beat back a deadly brain cancer (then she got complacent and began partying and it came back and killed her) and he is researching and has a website and I subscribe to his email. He also offers consulting, which is becoming popular in alternative cancer world and sells books. Some of these people charge up to 500 for a consult.

He seems to buy into the cholesterol theory and things which are bad toward heart disease tend to also promote cancer, so it may be relevant.

So I wonder if some of the people here who like to dig into research results would like to have a look at this:

Anna . . . I have had a look at the cancer site you referenced. I went through a few of the links asserting that meat causes colon cancer, saturated fat causes various cancer . . . etc and all of those links point to other articles on the site . . . and when I read those articles they are nothing more than assertion and belief. In none of those I looked at led to a serious scientific study.

Just to give one example .. one act of faith amongst the vegetarian/vegan community is that meat is bad and therefore is the probable cause of colon-rectal cancer. However, when you do a systematic study into the data it does not hold up.

The conclusion . . .
“In conclusion, based on the quantitative findings and scientific rationale for interpretation documented in the current meta-analysis, red meat intake does not appear to be an independent predictor of CRC risk.”

Anna . . . there seems to be increasing evidence that many of our ‘modern’ diseases seem to be exacerbated by high levels of insulin – this includes cancer and heart disease. NB insulin, besides being an agent to transfer glucose into cells, is a growth promoter (something very handy for a cancer tumour), it also can reduce the production of protective nitric oxide in endothelial cells and so make endothelial cells more susceptible to damage and inflammation.

You are doing the right thing having a low carb (low insulinogenic) diet . . this will keep diabetes, cancer, dementia and heart disease at bay and . . . WOW what a bonus . . . will keep the kilos in check.

My take on red meat and saturated fat is that IF it was as toxic as is claimed we would have become extinct millennia ago. To find the causes of “modern” diseases you need to look at recent changes, in the food and the environment.

Yes agree on the insulin as the “man behind the curtain”. Another curiosity is people eating high carb diets without hyperinsulinemia elsewhere. More evidence now points to the massive excess of industrially produced Omega 6 seed oils (and corresponding lack of Omega 3) as a potential factor in driving up insulin resistance, oh and chronic inflammation in general. When one domino falls it brings the rest down.

Hi Antony/Anna. In general I don’t subscribe to the view that substances made by our body are out to get us. I never believed the cholesterol hogwash and I am about the same with insulin. It is true that insulin levels rise when carbs are ingested…but when blood glucose is low (zero or very low carb diets, or fasting) – why aren’t people concerned about hyperglucagonemia or elevated cortisol – both of which act to increase blood sugar? Surely those alpha cells would cop a flogging (glucagon production)? I have read a lot about insulin and have yet to see a study that proves causation…only association.

With respect to diet – we need about 40 or essential vitamins/minerals/amino acids and we also use food for energy. For me, it makes sense to eat foods rich in these essential nutrients and avoid those that merely supply energy and also those that contain compounds/additives that our body doesn’t need/use. Meat and eggs are packed with essential nutrients…I eat at least 14 eggs a week. In terms of saturated fat, Zoe Harcombe wrote a great blog piece showing that all food that contain fat have saturated fat…including olive oil….so if saturated fat was really going to kill you, you’d have to avoid ALL fat…not to mention that when our bodies make fat they make – saturated fat! At the end of the day, carbs and fats only contain carbon, oxygen and hydrogen….which along with nitrogen are what our bodies are primarily composed of…

My take on red meat and saturated fat is that IF it was as toxic as is claimed we would have become extinct millennia ago. To find the causes of “modern” diseases you need to look at recent changes, in the food and the environment.

Yes agree on the insulin as the “man behind the curtain”. Another curiosity is people eating high carb diets without hyperinsulinemia elsewhere. More evidence now points to the massive excess of industrially produced Omega 6 seed oils (and corresponding lack of Omega 3) as a potential factor in driving up insulin resistance, oh and chronic inflammation in general. When one domino falls it brings the rest down.

Thank you for telling about the strong benefits of the chelation for a CVD victim (and a metallurgist) like me. Perhaps I should go for it somewhere though I feel that I am now in i a reasonably good shape when chopping two truck loads of fire wood for it to dry up during the summer and to be used next winter.

We have a sealed wood stove that uses outside air (certified because of the house has a ventilation system). I find that when I use it (not very often, as heating with electricity and heat pump is cheaper and much less work), there is always a whiff of smoke in the living room.

A sealed wood stove is also my “fireplace”. It is a very effective unit and you can enjoy the fire and the radiant heat through the glass window at the same time. No toxic fumes! I use it almost every day (here is where my fire wood goes) – it is very relaxing practice to sitt infront of it and watch the flames of the fire and with a glass of red wine close by. “Good for my heart!”

I have also got a heat pump for the general heating of my old house and this pump is also very efficient.

I find this curious. For about 12 years I lived on a farm where we used a wood combustion stove for cooking and a wood burning pot belly heater for heating in Winter. The smell of burning wood was a welcome one in our home….Yes there were particulates in the smoke but that was what came out of the flu..And as we on a fram in a rural area this was not a major issue..In the nearby towns however with wood burning stoves and heaters there was a real health issue at times.It caused breathing problems for some people. But this I always thought of as a consequence of high density of people burning wood.

Some smoke of course escapes when one opens the door to put in another log, but even with the door closed, even the fire out, there is a minute whiff that a sensitive nose can catch for a day or two after the stove was used.

Eiric, not with my stove. No smoke escapes when I open the door except when I am being careless, and there is absolutely no smell after using the stove as long as there is adequate air supply and the flue is sound. Trying to burn too slowly generates smoke, and that may escape through rope seals, or having a damper on the flue can put the stove in a positive pressure mode and so force the gases out, or opening the door when there is smoke in the stove. Why is there smoke in the stove? Smoke is wasted fuel. Never have a flue damper, that way the stove should be under negative pressure, providing the flue is built properly. Any smoke smell means CO will also escape, and that is both unacceptable, and unnecessary. Here endeth the lesson, Amen.

@AH: the exhaust chimney is a double walled stainless steel affair with 3 cm of rockwool in between, total length of 6 m. We were told that the low heat capacitance und good insulation would promote air flow and make the stove easy to light.

In fact, when it is rainy and sort of warm, i.e. 8°C outside, the stove can be a bear to light. I have taken to burning several handfuls of dried twigs to establish an airflow in the chimney.

Eric, your experience with lighting in warm damp weather is common. With damp air there is not so much oxygen availabel, and the warmth often means there is a plug of warm air up the flue preventing the air from below getting out. It needs a hot fire to shift anything hence your twig solution. If you light your fire at the bottom, you will find it useful to put large logs on first, and reduce them in size as you add more layers. Put the kindling on top and the twigs or shavings on the top of that. When you light it you have the hottest gases available to send up the chimney rather than cooler heavy smoke. The fire is also easier to manage and needs less attention.

I have two antique soapstone stoves that keep us toasty in our cold New England home.
The one in the parlor is served by a chimney that goes through the center of the house and is lined with inch-thick pumice aggregate cylinders. Excellent insulation already in a protected house space. No leakage. No smoke. Never a problem starting.
The kitchen stove is served by that double walled stainless rock-wool filled cylindrical chimney already mentioned here. It goes up the outside of the house. Smokes! Hard to start! The thing is that it gets chilled overnight so that the dense cold air wants to fall. The tricks I’ve learned to overcome the problems include putting a twist of paper up into the horizontal flue, opening the damper and intake vent all the way, opening the outside kitchen door a crack and lighting that twist. It’s enough to warm the flue air to the point that it will be less dense than the coolish kitchen air. You need that differential for upward flow. Now you can start the serious fire.

Often, local masonry chimneys are lined with rectangular-in-cross-section fired clay liners. This is a mistake. Clay liners. are very poor insulators, so that creosote will condense and collect, increasing the chance of a chimney fire with intense heat that the clay won’t stand up to. Creosote never condenses in my insulating pumice flue liners. And, even if it did, it could handle the heat of a chimney fire.
Also, hot smokey air streaming up a confined space such as a flue wants to go up in a spiral. A cylindrical flue accommodates this; a rectangular one does not. Go with the flow.
(I hope I can get this in before we’re cut off by our generous host!) 🙂

JD,
I remember a chimney fire from my childhood. Very scary! We had a double-storey house with a steep pitched roof and the chimney going up an outside wall, so I guess a long cool length of rectangular brickwork for soot to condense into.

They cleared the fire out of the grate, but the chimney carried on roaring, loader and louder, with a tremendous draught that sucked up anything loose near the fireplace. The bricks became too hot to touch. I peered up the flue before anyone could stop me. It looked like a black cylinder lined with coals twinkling and glowing bright where points projected into the rushing air.

My dad called out the workers and they climbed on the roof with a hosepipe and eventually got the fire out. Much muttering from my mother at the wet, sooty mess in the lounge. And the chimney sweep became an annual visitor.

Martin I too had a chimney fire on one occasion.We had just moved into our farm home and burned some card board boxes and paper in the open fire. That started the built up creosote on the brick chimney wall burning. It was spectacular & scary but burned out after 10 minutes.

The house was recently built so there should not have been such a build up of creosote. I assume that the previous owners burned green wood in the fire. Such wood certainly burns cooler and deposits creosote on the inner wall of the brick chimney.

We heat with wood. It’s a lot of work, plenty of exercise, but we don’t get any wood smell, as we, (or you) shouldn’t. Smells mean the flue is not working properly and should be sorted out. The risk of CO poisoning is significant with solid fuel.

Malcolm, what is your thought about the idea that CHD came and went as an epidemic disease during the last century? I think you have posted something earlier about unclear definition and reporting of causes of death.

On the subject of lead, I wonder what happened in Roman times when they used lead-lined channels to convey drinking water. We still had lead water pipes when I was young. Now they are mostly copper or plastic – but then I recall someone who worked at a plastics factory who was regularly tested for lead exposure. When their blood levels reached toxic they were laid off on full pay until it came down again. I think that was PVC.

chris c, end of pandemic might be due to Rachel Carson’s SILENT SPRING. DDT replaced by ROUNUP and other more user friendly herbicides, pesticides and fungicides. CVD rates appears to be on the rise, will food production practices be blamed?

Fascinating post by Dr David Grimes. Dr Kendrick has noted the decline of CHD in the UK and USA since the mid-to-late 60’s. But I don’t recall seeing any mention of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic as a possible contributor to CHD in the 20th century.

Grimes thinks that all CVD is an infectious disease (or the end result of infectious diseases). I do not. I do however believe that infectious diseases can trigger CVD. Or to put it another way. Infectious diseases are A cause of CVD, but not THE cause. Trying to shoehorn all of CVD into a infectious disease model simply does not work.

I seem to remember being told that lead water pipes will, over time, develop an inner coating due to chemical reaction with whatever else is in the water. Seems logical, given that hard water causes calcium deposits. How this plays out in soft water areas I cannot say. My first eighteen years were lived in an area that had very soft acidic water, and kettles never furred up, but had been known to develop rust holes.

The rigid plastic pipes have a certain amount of lead in them ( from memory 7-9% ) to provide a bit of flexibility. Without it PVC pipes are to brittle. It is stable in the PVC ( not leached out ) but lead is released when ever the pipes are worked cut etc.

Oh yes lots of changes around the same time, replacement of organochlorines with organophosphates, the rise of plastics with iffy ingredients, probably lots of possible interactions like what happens when lead and fluoride collide . . . but it must be the saturated fat because animals.

ps/ a couple of replies seem to be stuck in moderation again. Could be worse, Tom Naughton’s entire blog has been taken down by attackers,

Dear Malcolm
Is endolethial damage a one way street? That is, once damaged, does it stay so? I thought our bodies were subject to continuous renewal, some parts more quickly than others, if so when the endolethial lining renews why does it renew damaged? About l- arginine, I understand it’s half life in the body is short, about an hour, is the improvement it brings short lived, and was that why in Prokardia the daily dose was divided in four?
So many questions, so little time?

Eric, if the plaque is below the endothelium then chelation would not reduce it. Chelation would bind only to minerals (good and bad) in the bloodstream. Removing calcium deposits with K2 and D3 via LCHF low inflammatory diet probably a better bet.

Session 1262 – Special Populations: The Good, the Bad, the Old, the Young and the Sweet Ones (and Others Too!)
1262-441 / 441 – Risk of Myocardial Infarction in Patients With Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Thank you Dr Kendrick for a very important and informative post, I have not seen any articles with this info here in South Australia where we have huge lead issues as we still have the very large smelters in the north of the state at Port Pirie. I had a look today and SA Health reports on the continual damage to our children in this area due to lead exposure issues like lowered IQ, mental disorders and many other physical issues persist apparently their last report is 2017. (These smelters have been there for over 100yrs) It would be interesting to know what the figures from cardiac issues are compared to the rest of the population of this state among the adults.
Bill has previously mentioned the concerns re leaded petrol which has only been ceased reasonably recently here in Australia and while I was doing a bit of searching this morning I came across this article detailing the testing of backyards in Sydney

It makes me so angry that folk are exposed without consent, choice, and no knowledge that they may be putting themselves and especially their children at risk while they are trying to grow a few veggies and keep a few chickens to provide some fresh food.
I found the information that some people are more affected by issues due to their genes than others interesting as this is never taken into consideration when major decisions regarding community health are initiated the attitude seems to be that the majority of people will be OK with whatever and that the others the minimal number will not matter as the figures for this minimal number of people is never revealed (how many people in a minimal?) the real and human tragedy is not revealed unless deaths occur but to have your child’s IQ damaged and their opportunities for happy and fulfilling lives to be diminished and even for them to lose their parents and grandparents prematurely from exposure to lead and other substances that have been known to be dangerous for years is criminal. I guess it is acceptable to just go with a ‘heart attack’
Asbestos, fluoride, lead, pesticides and herbicides have been used for generations and we are now seeing the horrible consequences of that use it seems to take forever before action is taken and effective warnings given. We have huge problems here with asbestos and the number of people we are currently treating and this will not diminish any time soon, the Medical Records of folk who are identified as having been exposed to some of these now have to be retained until 2040 by law and at that time it will be decided whether to extend this time or not.
Fluoride here is considered like statins as an appropriate health initiative and like statins anyone who queries its use as an addition to all our water supplies is very firmly pounced on when an area in Queensland tried to have it removed the Dental Association jumped up and down hard and heavy and the requests from the rate payers of that area were summarily dismissed. In spite of all this the health of our children’s teeth has worsened over the last years very recent report has caused alarm in the Dental community that babies teeth are erupting in a poor state, the hospital where I work has a dental service where toddlers are regularly admitted to have their teeth repaired under a general anaesthetic. Bad teeth are bad for the heart. Fluoride versus sugary drinks no contest! Just an aside I raised my son alone with little money we never drank fluoridated water and could not afford the black currant juice so popular at the time and my son with regular dental check-ups which I paid for did not need any dental repairs until he was 34yrs old by which time he was paying for his own checks.
Most if not all of these things is fed by the love of money as the old Bible saying goes ‘The love of money is the root of all sorts of injurious things…..’ 1Timothy 6.10.

topsygirl, though I agree that reducing risks is a good thing (why I don’t know, just a belief) don’t worry about it, and get angry. The world population is increasing at around 85 million a year despite all the “problems”. This is really something to worry about, as when the limit it is reached, (as it will be), the catastrophic change will be worse the longer it is before it happens.

AH
When the Population Limit is Reached (as it will be)
(Sorry Dr K, this is not off topic as you opened the door by introducing Climate change, as the judge said to the prosecutor)

There is a potentially MAJOR (as in bold and underlined) disruptor on the horizon.

Please research Climate Change (it appears that many sceptical readers already have) and the subject of Mini Ice Age which the Earth seems to be entering.

If true (I believe it is, while renegade sceptical climatologists say they have the supporting science, I believe them) then the resulting famine may reduce the Earths population significantly (which may delay the “as it will be” time point by some centuries.

And hidden in a quote from a paper, there was this gem: ” Indeed, it was shown that TLR2?/? mice are protected from atherosclerosis, and this effect could be mediated by cells other than bone marrow-derived29. “

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180322141013.htm
from: PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases
“Unusual blood clots in leprosy patients characterized
For years, doctors have observed that some patients with leprosy develop unusual blood clots which can lead to stroke or heart attack. Now, researchers have for the first time characterized these blood clots, leading to a new understanding of how leprosy affects the circulatory system and potential new screening tests to predict leprosy reactions.”

Your open minded skeptism puts me in mind of Michael Crichton, another MD who could write, albeit in his case, the ease with which he could rattle off bestsellers lured him away fron medicine almost as soon as he graduated med school. He would often attack global warming enforcers by citing historical examples of medical fallacies swallowed whole by learned medical opinion.
His musings on the causes of cardiac events even seem to anticipate the good Doctor K. As a young intern he simply asked cardiac patients “what caused your heart attack?” And they told him. Nobody answered: diet, smoking drink etc. They told him things like “I lost my job” “My daughter got pregnant” “My house was foreclosed on”. Heart breaking stress to put it another way. He had quite a lot of disillusionment with orthodox medicine which I think primed him to contest the global warming consensus.

CVD rates started dropping around the time antidepressants started being used. Coincidence?

“While developing new antitubercular compounds, Fox and Gibas (1953) synthesized isopropyl-isonicotinyl hydrazide (iproniazid), a monoalkyl derivative of isoniazid, which would later serve as a catalyst for pharmacological treatment of MDD [Major Depressive Disorder]. Clinical observations reported marked “side effects” of iproniazid in patients being treated for tuberculosis, which included euphoria, psychostimulation, increased appetite, and improved sleep. The “side effects” produced by iproniazid were not originally identified as therapeutic effects because these side effects were not consistent across studies (Lopez-Munoz et al., 2007; Pletscher, 1991). Loomer, Saunders, and Kline (1958) conducted a systematic clinical study on patients with depression, in which the patients were treated with iproniazid for several weeks. Loomer and colleagues reported significant improvements in 70% of these patients (Loomer et al., 1958). While iproniazid was marketed as an antitubercular compound under the trade name Marsilid® in 1958, it was used off-label to treat patients suffering from MDD.

…As a result of the discovery and success of chlorpromazine for the treatment of schizophrenia, the search for more potent antipsychotic drugs intensified. Many of these novel compounds were molecularly modified from the classic antihistamine structure… Imipramine (Tofranil®) was approved in 1959 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of MDD, which established the class of drugs called tricyclic antidepressants (TCA).” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4428540/

Thanks, Antony. Chris Woollams is in the UK by the way. I had a good opinion of him as smart and pursuing scientific research.
I also gave up dairy (mostly) for the reasons you mention. It has insulin-like growth factor, some sugar, and so on. In my case, I’m trying to prevent a recurrence.
I’m not sure I’m right. I’m winging it.

I suspect you won’t be back. I regarded the name change to climate change as a dodging maneuver. I get that the globe is big and increased warmth could result in some unstable and surprising effects here and there, but if CO2 is the big bad greenhouse gas, then we are talking about global warming. Either the globe is getting warmer or it isn’t.

Put this phrase into google: Images of C02 and temperature 600 million years.

Note that while life was thriving and evolving, CO2 levels reached as high as 7000 ppm at times, and also note that the relationship of CO2 to temperature has little to do with one another throughout most of that time.

It is true that they are coupled during this CURRENT ice age – but even here the temperature leads the CO2. Temp rises first.

So I have a few questions about CO2.
1. Given that CO2 is necessary for life on this planet, what amount would be too low? I’ve looked that up and it is around 150-180 ppm. If you look at the ice age two ice ages back, you will see a very low dip, but it appears to be just slightly higher than the lowest dip ever. That lowest dip occurred just before this last glaciation ended and it appears to me that it was perilously close to that range of 180, which could have been an extinction event.

2. Given that our CO2 level at the start of industrialization was around 280 ppm, and given that even this is quite low in the history of life, why are we worried?

3. Seeing the incredible range of CO2 in the history of life, what would be the ideal level? According to the global warming theory, it is 280 ppm. Isn’t that quite a coincidence, seeing that the very moment that humans got the scientific know-how to measure such things, we happened to be in exactly the ideal and only acceptable CO2 level at that time? Given 600 million years of variations of about 25X.

4. Finding out that plants have an ideal around 1200 ppm and this is what many greenhouse gardeners in business shoot for when they put CO2 into their greenhouses, and given that throughout most of the time of life on this planet when things were evolving CO2 levels were much higher than today, might it be reasonable to assume that we are actually in a low point of CO2 and that plants are barely happy even at the current almost 400 ppm?

And by the way, we are in an ice age, have been in it for 1-3 million years, yet 80% of the time earth has been a warm and tropical planet. Should we really assume that ice age conditions are the right ones?

This discussion is very interesting, but I must draw a line under it. I can see it spiralling out of control here. As it does everywhere else. Maybe at some time in the future I will create a Climate Change blog. Not yet, however,

Dr Kendrick, I too am aware that this discussion about climate change is not germane to this blog.But can I ask you to indulge me asking Dearie Me if she could provide a simple list of sources for her statements? As an agnostic on the subject I find this interesting. But yes it belongs elsewhere after that.

AnnaM, thank you for the analysis, I hope I haven’t conflicted with the climate embargo. It certainly raises questions about the current situation and the future. I am not convinced one way or the other, but better that than holding some consensus view.

@Malcom or anyone, do you have data about CV events during WW1 or WW2 France. I found some pre/post war Germany , there was a skyrocket event, then drop off. The chart is awful as it has a NAZI flag on it and I do not wish to offend, but here is the site: https://rawfoodsos.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/norway_wwii.jpg

I do have data, of a sort. But many countries did not use the International Classification of Diseases system until the WHO was created in 1948. Even then, many countries did not use this system. So, different countries called diseases different things. There were no deaths in the US from CHD until 1948, because the disease was not classified. It was lumped under ‘heart disease.’ The first myocardial infarction was not defined until 1912.

I am trying to see if the French suffered stress related heart disease spikes around WW1 or 2 with huge social upheaval, deaths and stress. Anyone have any information, I am not finding much, maybe it is just not out there due to extreme times…

As we get older, our endurance declines, in part because our blood vessels lose some of their capacity to deliver oxygen and nutrients to muscle tissue. An MIT-led research team has now found that it can reverse this age-related endurance loss in mice by treating them with a compound that promotes new blood vessel growth.

The study found that the compound, which re-activates longevity-linked proteins called sirtuins, promotes the growth of blood vessels and muscle, boosting the endurance of elderly mice by up to 80 percent.

If the findings translate to humans, this restoration of muscle mass could help to combat some of the effects of age-related frailty, which often lead to osteoporosis and other debilitating conditions.

“We’ll have to see if this plays out in people, but you may actually be able to rescue muscle mass in an aging population by this kind of intervention,” says Leonard Guarente, the Novartis Professor of Biology at MIT and one of the senior authors of the study. “There’s a lot of crosstalk between muscle and bone, so losing muscle mass ultimately can lead to loss of bone, osteoporosis, and frailty, which is a major problem in aging.”

The first author of the paper, which appears in Cell on March 22, is Abhirup Das, a former postdoc in Guarente’s lab who is now at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Other senior authors of the paper are David Sinclair, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the University of New South Wales, and Zolt Arany, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Race against time

In the early 1990s, Guarente discovered that sirtuins, a class of proteins found in nearly all animals, protect against the effects of aging in yeast. Since then, similar effects have been seen in many other organisms.

In their latest study, Guarente and his colleagues decided to explore the role of sirtuins in endothelial cells, which line the inside of blood vessels. To do that, they deleted the gene for SIRT1, which encodes the major mammalian sirtuin, in endothelial cells of mice. They found that at 6 months of age, these mice had reduced capillary density and could run only half as far as normal 6-month-old mice.

The researchers then decided to see what would happen if they boosted sirtuin levels in normal mice as they aged. They treated the mice with a compound called NMN, which is a precursor to NAD, a coenzyme that activates SIRT1. NAD levels normally drop as animals age, which is believed to be caused by a combination of reduced NAD production and faster NAD degradation.

After 18-month-old mice were treated with NMN for two months, their capillary density was restored to levels typically seen in young mice, and they experienced a 56 to 80 percent improvement in endurance. Beneficial effects were also seen in mice up to 32 months of age (comparable to humans in their 80s).

“In normal aging, the number of blood vessels goes down, so you lose the capacity to deliver nutrients and oxygen to tissues like muscle, and that contributes to decline,” Guarente says. “The effect of the precursors that boost NAD is to counteract the decline that occurs with normal aging, to reactivate SIRT1, and to restore function in endothelial cells to give rise to more blood vessels.”

These effects were enhanced when the researchers treated the mice with both NMN and hydrogen sulfide, another sirtuin activator.

Benefits of exercise

The researchers also found that SIRT1 activity in endothelial cells is critical for the beneficial effects of exercise in young mice. In mice, exercise generally stimulates growth of new blood vessels and boosts muscle mass. However, when the researchers knocked out SIRT1 in endothelial cells of 10-month-old mice, then put them on a four-week treadmill running program, they found that the exercise did not produce the same gains seen in normal 10-month-old mice on the same training plan.

If validated in humans, the findings would suggest that boosting sirtuin levels may help older people retain their muscle mass with exercise, Guarente says. Studies in humans have shown that age-related muscle loss can be partially staved off with exercise, especially weight training.

“What this paper would suggest is that you may actually be able to rescue muscle mass in an aging population by this kind of intervention with an NAD precursor,” Guarente says.

In 2014, Guarente started a company called Elysium Health, which sells a dietary supplement containing a different precursor of NAD, known as NR, as well as a compound called pterostilbene, which is an activator of SIRT1.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original written by Anne Trafton. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

What about fortification of food Dr Kendrick? Where iron is present in its natural state it appears to be balanced by (manganese etc) to prevent extremes of oxidation. Presumably this doesn’t happen where the iron is artificially added? “Just eat real food” – who said that?

Doesn’t address causation, except indirectly through inhibition of NO etc, i.e it fails to cause arterial plaques, and fails to explain why plaques do not form in veins.

So while it may contribute to heart disease it looks like a ‘contributory factor’ that weakens our ability to survive under other assaults to the vascular system.

Having watched a number of Tim Noakes talks, I took notice of a reference to Zonulin and the work done by Alessio Fasano and others to examine how the gut becomes leaky and allows the passage of pathogens. Zonulin regulates tight junctions in the gut in response to pathogens in order to flush them out (e.g. Cholera), but opening tight junctions allows ingress as well as egress leading to leaky gut and inflammation. Note that lead absorption is mainly through the gastrointestinal tract. Note also that the high levels of gliandins in modern wheats have the same effect of stimulating Zonulin.

This https://www.nature.com/articles/srep29142 examined the role of Zonulin in elevated levels of Enterobacteriaceaes in the vascular system, noting that CVD patients had higher levels of circulating Zonulin and Enterobacteriaceaes.

I understand that atherosclerotic plaques contain bacteria, that cause inflammation and are normally found in the gastrointestinal tract, so there is a route, facilitated by the Zonulin response, to facilitate bacteria entering the blood stream chronically as a result of leaky gut and acutely by bacterial infection (e.g. gastroenteritis/Cholera). But there is a problem here too of no atherosclerotic plaques in veins, which could be due to the filtering of blood in capillaries with bacteria being returned not through the venous system, but through the lymphatic circulation (e.g. http://www.breastcancer.org/treatment/lymphedema/how/lymph_system ) where they are phagocytized, but that doesn’t explain how bacteria are present in the arteries leaving the heart!

I looked in vain for any statement at all from Dearie Me. Was it possibly me you were asking?
If so I will tell you that the phrase I mentioned above and put into google bought up the graphs and from there all questions are my own musings.

Thanks for that AnnaM.. I got confused about who wrote the comment. I will do as you suggest.

However I am currently reading a book published in 2006 “Out of Thin Air ” by Peter Ward. Ward traces the process evolution by animal and plant species to the variation in Oxygen and CO2 levels. Often the chnages were driven by catastrophic events like asteroid impacts…I fancy the big picture, once grasped, will offer a clearer understanding of this whole climate issue.

Craig E,
You have a sensible idea, but I don’t think the logic holds up. We don’t worry about hyperglucagonemia largely because it is rare. As to cortisol, we most definitely can have too much and the consequences can be devastating. Of course insulin is a good and necessary hormone, but when I see half the kids in the local shopping area very fat as young as 3, I know something is wrong.
Jason Fung spoke well about the need to have a balance between filling the tank and emptying the tank. He is against constant snacking. We need to give it a rest. All things in balance.

Thanks for the response AnnaM. Is elevated Glucagon rare or just not tested? It strikes me that those who go zero carb or very low carb would have to have elevated Glucagon to avoid slipping into a hypoglycemic coma. Glucagon stimulates Glycogenolysis and Gluconeogenesis to raise blood glucose. I know that ketones are eventually produced and exported from the liver to supply cells with an energy source in times of short glucose supply but many cells still exclusively use glucose for energy. I have read a lot of Jason Fung, including his filling tank analogy. However, people who eat low carb diets will still gain weight if they overconsume one of the other macronutrients. When someone eats more fat than is needed for energy it has to go somewhere. Fat is mainly carbon and hydrogen. The main way carbon leaves our body is via cellular respiration – as CO2. There would also be small amounts in feces…mainly cellular waste. So at the time of eating a fat based meal you might use some for energy via respiration but the rest has to be stored. Gaining weight is therefore more to do with excess food consumption than insulin. Just because fat doesn’t raise insulin levels doesn’t mean it won’t be stored. Did you see the latest results from Taubes’ NuSi Dietfits study? One of the key findings was that differences in insulin secretion made no difference in weight change amongst the two diet groups. In trying to come up with answers here I focus mainly on the biochemistry as good quality studies in the field of nutrition are hard to come by.

I guess then that Taubes, for sure to his own disappointment, has been unable to prove “his” weight gain (excess insulin) theory.

It is fundamentally impossible to deny that we gain weight when we take in more calories than we give out but this fact (if you believe in basic thermodynamics) does not provide anything about a cause by which we generally gain around 30 kg over 30 years which in essence mean that we are “overeating” a few grams per day. By abstaining from those “extra” grams we should theoretically stay as lean as most of us were in our twentieth. In my eyes this “theory” then doesn’t hold the water and with Taubes i believe that hormonal factors still may be at play but in a more complex setting.

Recently I read ( forgot though where) that the general increase of toxic substances from new agricultural practices may be a culprit.

Goran, why are we looking for “THE CAUSE” of a biological system failing?
For a mechanical system such as an airplane there are many independent reasons why it could crash, but gravity is the main reason.
For a biological system there are a multitude of interrelated pathways. The connection between all the variables discussed so far is cellular energy production by the mitochondria. No energy = no vitality. We also get a lot of help from a healthy gut microbiome where diet plays a big role.
This blog is about lead, what effect does it have on the mitochondria of all cells. Only considering CVD is too narrow a focus.

I assume elevated glucagon is rare because most of us are eating more than we need and eating often. My daughter tried hard to lose weight but when she went low carb the weight came off. I don’t know what to make of a study showing that insulin secretion made no difference to weight gain. Frankly, if that is true I throw in the towel. It flies in the face of what I thought was known.
Of course, there are plump Eskimos, aren’t there? Yes, I am sure if you eat too much fat it will have to be stored. But it isn’t that easy to really overeat fat.
My brother also was able to reduce his a1C from late prediabetes to normal by following Fung’s advice and fasting several times for 2 months.
What do you think of Fung’s stuff? What do you disagree with.

Goran, I am really interested in the interplay between hormones and their impact on energy homeostasis and weight gain. Being from a biochemical background I am always suspicious about claims (such as those of Taubes and others) that one hornone alone is to blame for weight gain. I am also trying to reconcile the link between mass of ingested foodstuffs and energy needs and weight gain or loss. As an example, when we drink water…if we are sufficiently hydrated most of that water mass will be passed in the urine. However, when we drink milk, coke, juice, etc much of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen mass will be stored if there is not a net demand for ATP at that time..as will the nitrogen from the amino acids if it’s needed to build enzymes, muscle and such at the time. Whether mass is stored or used involves several intricately involved mechanisms responding to cellular energy needs including allosteric modification, intracellular second messengers, phosphorylation of enzymes to increase/reduce activity and of course hormone activation, to name a few. Anyway, I could go on for hours about this, but it’s off topic. I am sure it’ll come back again when Dr K starts blogging on diabetes. Cheers

My own experience is that the deeper one digs into a (any?) subject the easy, categorical explanations tend to evaporate more and more.

To grasp the nutritional science, as a researcher in metallurgy for many years, I immediately realized that I had to do some basic homework in this completely new discipline to me if I was to be taken seriously.

I started ten years ago with reading Taubes book “Good Calories and Bad Calories” and was overwhelmed by what I learnt knowing that Taubes is basically a journalist of science but awarded several times for his writing and not without reason. After a second more thorough reading i still find the book to be a magnificently solid journalistic work but which can be criticized in details. He has in my eyes giving a very well referenced overall historical picture of the present obesity epidemic and I haven’t found any serious Popperian refutations.

My next mission was to read some basic medical textbooks not to feel as a complete fool when facing medical texts.

But the real deep digging was when I jumped into your own microbiological field – I loved this jump since this area is closer to my own basic physics and my favorite discipline chemistry. I did this by reading the standard textbook on the subject, the 1200 pages, “Molecular Biology of THE CELL”, by Alberts et al. I read the fifth edition twice and the second time more thoroughly. The new sixth edition was also a great reading. What I learnt here was to adopt a very humble attitude to what is going on at the very basic levels of our physiology.

The interactions on all levels, from the basic atomic interactions to what is happening by the “control” through the different nervous systems involved, not least in the main subject of this blog, CVD, do not encourage and categorical standpoints. When I learnt, by reading Alberts, that we actually know very little about how our 20 000 + proteins interact with one another specifically and in general this certainly added to my “humbleness”.

The funny thing is that LCHF seems to work if you want to reverse T2D and get out of the metabolic syndrom.

@AnnaM…for me I seem to take the kind of attitude that Dr K does. It’s not enough for something to seem logical….why and how does it happen. You say “most of us are eating more than we need” which is on the money. It may be that carbs are easiest to overconsume but it’s not carbs per se that are fattening. Interestingly from what I have read, protein is the most satiating with fat and carbs about the same. It’s not that I disagree with Fung…I like his ideas and read his blog/follow him. I just can’t see how they work biochemically. When you go low carb you switch to fatty acids and ketones for a proportion of energy production…but you will still gain weight if you over eat.

Craig E: I think part of the solution to the conundrum you’ve presented (while it is physiologically possible to become overweight on a low-carb diet, it doesn’t often happen) is that a low-carb diet tends to be more satiating and less hunger producing. I get hungry, but not so much so that I can’t wait three or four hours to eat if something comes up or if the meal takes an unexpectedly long time to prepare. I never feel the urge to eat between my two daily meals.

@Goran I love your approach and have also thoroughly enjoyed your insights and stories since tripping over this blog in 2014. I have Taubes’ “Why we get fat…” but then…I also have Anthony Colpo’s “Fat loss bible” and they couldn’t be more opposed. My go to’s for Biochem were Lehninger and Voet&Voet. As I have said previously l many of the 20th century biochemists were true scientists not corrupted by money…just an eagerness to be the first to, for example, fully elicidate a biochemical pathway. I don’t have all the answers but like you, i keep at it til I do.

“Of course, there are plump Eskimos, aren’t there? Yes, I am sure if you eat too much fat it will have to be stored. But it isn’t that easy to really overeat fat.”

I fully agree with Anna’s comment, and to me it highlights the central problem of dietary science, one which no one seems to be addressing.

To wit: Why is it easy to overeat carbs, but difficult to overeat fat?

As far as the body is concerned, they are simply fuel to be burnt, and just as we know how much wood or coal to put on a fire to achieve the desired heat, we should know how much food to eat to achieve the desired metabolism. But for many of us, once we start shoveling the carbs in, we lose all self-control.

The medical profession advises to cut down on fats to lose weight, because fats are more energy-dense in terms of calories per gram. Sounds sensible in theory, but in practice it is the carb consumption which is out of control and needs to be dialed back.

My personal opinion is it is advertising of carb-rich food which stimulates the appetite, food science which creates food which is unnaturally tasty, and marketing of ready-to-eat and tasty carb-rich snacks available everywhere and anytime at lowish prices

Just to nitpick a tad, surely Eski…..ahem….Inuit people actually have an extra layer of fat to keep them warm in such a cold environment, rather than that they are ‘plump.’ I am skinny as a rake and have difficulty keeping warm even in the kindly climate of West Cornwall.
By the way, I eat every little carb but eat all manner of fatty stuff as if it’s going out of fashion. My weight stays absolutely constant at 8 stones. Bring on the clotted cream.

@Martin Back…very good points. I have seen several hypotheses as to why we overeat (carbs or food in general) including:
– glucose hits the same pleasure sensors in the brain as cocaine
– most non-water drinks have a high carb content relevant to other macronurients and liquids are easy to overconsume
– leptin resistence
– design of foods by fake food companies to make the food is so tasty that you eat more even when you feel full
– in today’s fast pasted world we rush the eating of meals and therefore overeat before the fullness signals have a chance to kick
– we are hard wired to eat when food is plentiful…and these days food is – at least in Western nations – plentiful
– we are gluttons
But I do agree getting to the bottom over why we overeat is important in solving problems with weight.

Regarding Taubes I understand that he was “forced” by his publisher to write the lighter version of his GCBC (Good Calories & Bad Calories and today already a classic) since this book comprising 400 references and his five years of work on the subject was considered to be too difficult to read for the general public. It turned out in the popular version “Why we get fat” and here I to my surprise also find LCHF recipes which seems to be a must in this type of books but which I find find far from Taubes general scientific attitude in writing.

GCBC is though completely to my own taste since it is, with it’s broad journalistic approach, still solid, serious and with a strong and very plausible narrative line explaining how we got where we are today in terms of nutrition and health and not least exposes the “corruption” along the way.

Regarding insulin/glucagon interaction I assume that you may be familiar with the price lecture of Prof. Roger Unger on this subject and a lecture I have linked to several times on this blog. That lecture was to me the most informative one I have come across on this subject.

Also Dr. Craft’s simultaneous measurements of insulin and blood glucose on his numerous patients trapped in the metabolic syndrom is worth a study for a deeper understanding of the subject.

“To wit: Why is it easy to overeat carbs, but difficult to overeat fat?”

Yes, this was the experience that was made at the famous one year Bellevue testing of the Inuit traditional diet based on meat and fish on the two polar explorers (Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Charlie Andersen).

It was a nausea limit that was found to be at around 80% fat, 20% protein. (I though wonder about 0% carbs since there must be some small amount in meat as well but yet very small.) Though overeating protein doesn’t seem to be a very good health idea which was also experienced by Stefansson on an arctic expedition when the whole team went seriously ill feeding exclusively on lean caribou meat. The team was rescued by the seal blubber brought in by an eskimo on his sledge.

There are evidently numerous ways to get poisoned as a human being and this is perhaps what health or absence of health is all about in the long run. Heavy metals as lead, copper and mercury are well known poisons. Sometimes you don’t need much of a substance to kill living species which is the poisonous foundation of the modern agriculture industry as well as of chemical warfare.

“There are evidently numerous ways to get poisoned as a human being and this is perhaps what health or absence of health is all about in the long run. Heavy metals as lead, copper and mercury are well known poisons.”

I do think comments of this sort should be read in the context of the fact that we are all living longer and longer on average. Chemists can measure incredibly low levels of metals and chemicals in food, but perhaps the truth is that these very low concentrations are not doing us any harm at all!

“Chemists can measure incredibly low levels of metals and chemicals in food, but perhaps the truth is that these very low concentrations are not doing us any harm at all!”

In most cases you are certainly right about this but there is an important caveat here which relates to endocrinological disturbances which in a non-linear fashion appear at extremely low levels of pesticides; almost incredibly low.

This fact has also been pointed out by organic agriculturist André Leu in his very revealing book “The Myths of Safe Pesticides”

For claiming the fact that one single drop of dioxin diluted in a number of tank-loads could be harmful the researcher Theo Colborn was originally much ridiculed but is now well recognized. Fish from the Baltic Sea is for this reason today not allowed as human food. (We have actually two relatives who many years ago were fishing a lot in this sea and they both had mentally severely retarded children.)

Better be wary aout eating any other farmed fish too. It will be near impossible to know where their feed comes from, and with the amount of chemicals used to reduce the effect of diseases and parasites, they are probably up to the eyeballs in toxins.

I would never dream of eating farmed fish of any kind although I am probably safe at my age and being male. Though, cancer is well known to be caused by various toxins so it might still be a good attitude to stay away from this kind of fish.

AH Notepad,
I don’t know…we have a Jotul, pretty well made. We also have a CO2 detector that never goes off. Some wood is more aromatic than others. Black walnut is lovely. Right now we burn a lot of ash as all the ash trees have died. Of course, some of the smell is because you do have to open the door from time to time to add wood and poke things.

Hmmm…… We have a Clearview. Wood gets added when the flames have died and there is just charcoal left. It only gets poked when clearing the ash in the bed once in the morning, and once in the evening. It gets enough draught to keep flames burning until there is only charcoal left, then it can be shut off completely. Do you have a damper in the flue? A CO monitor will probably go off if the room stinks. I

I am wondering what climate you live in. Perhaps it is not as cold. Yes, our stove will burn down to ash without further manipulation, but then you have to build a new fire, which is a hassle. The only time we do that is in the morning, but if we are lucky, there are enough coals in the morning to stick more wood on without having to start all over. When it is very cold, we add wood every 2-3 hours. My husband often adds wood in the middle of the night. I used to do that but I said to hell with that.

Excuse me Dr. K. I know this off topic, but my excuse is both CO and hypothermia have an influence on MI.
AnnaM, We are in the UK where we can get the continental influence. Not excessively cold, but we need heat now and then. I don’t let the stove burn down to ash, and the amount of wood added is a couple of logs which last around an hour. Once the yellow flames have gone, it’s time for more wood so the charcoal from previous logs is added to, and build up the charcoal bed. Now the cunning bit. About 3/4 hour before bedtime, add another log, and as soon as the yellow flames die, shut the air off, open the door and get the ash from the ash pan and add a layer over the top of the charcoal. This keeps the fire idling all night, and we have been able to start it up by raking the coals to get the ash back in the pan, up to 18 hours later. So overnight is easily do-able. In the morning I add a couple of logs, and repeat the process so it idles through the day and just keeps the chill off until we sit down and need the fire again.

I cannot comment on the firewood of Europe. the UK or North America. However here in Oz we quickly learn that dry ( not green ) heavy dense wood burns far longer and better.. And thta light wood burns quicker.. A local example : ‘red gum’ ( a eucalypt ) is very dense and heavy and will put out god heat for ages; but ‘messmate’ also a eucalypt species burns fast.

In the colder farming areas of Australia having a good supply of dry, dense firewood is the secret to staying warm through Winter.

Quoting :
“The findings with bone lead are dramatic. It is the first time we have had a biomarker of cumulative exposure to lead and the strong findings suggest that, even in an era when current exposures are low, past exposures to lead represent an important predictor of cardiovascular death, with important public health implications worldwide,” said Marc Weisskopf, assistant professor of environmental and occupational epidemiology at HSPH and lead author of the study.

Air pollution was the main source of lead in the environment in recent years, though it has been decreasing since leaded gasoline was banned in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. Most of the lead circulating in the body is deposited in bone and remains there for years, unlike blood lead, which has a half life of about 30 days. Since adverse effects from lead on the cardiovascular system would be expected to show up over time, the researchers expected that bone lead would be a better marker of chronic toxicity.”

Now does chelation therapy have any effective role in reversing the damage when the ’cause’ is a past ( historic ) one ? Does it just get rid of what is in the blood ? Or also what is deposited in bones ? And would this process of ‘liberating’ lead atoms from the bones, to get rid of it completely, have it’s own risks ?

LA_Bob
Thanks very much for the reply about LEAD as it relates to this post . Thanks also those links. I read the abstracts not the full articles. But it seems :
1 : That “In vivo tibial K x-ray fluorescence (XRF) is a safe, specific and reliable technique for the non-invasive measurement of elevated bone lead concentrations. “. Now that feels reassuring as it is a reasonably easy procedure.
2: That “… chelation treatment by the CaNa2 EDTA lead mobilization ……..showed a progressive fall in body lead stores during chelation therapy in association with improvement in symptoms and a fall in blood lead and zinc protoporphyrin levels.”
3 : Here is Oz the older vehicles that were designed to use only leaded petrol also still exist..But nowadays they are mainly driven on special occasions for heritage vehicles. And I think that there is a non leaded petrol substitute which is available for such vehicles..
4: i sometimes wonder about my own exposure to LEAD in my early years. Four years in postwar bombed out Liverpool; then another 4 years living on a migrant hostel in a very industrial inner suburb of Melbourne. Probably very significant LEAD exposure during those years. But fortunately since then I’ve lived mostly in rural pr smaller town Australia with far less exposure…

Correlation is not causation I know BUT, when I visit my daughter in NY literally everyone has food or drink in their hands 24/7. Even delivery guys driving are constantly eating and drinking. When DOES insulin have a chance be just pulsatile instead of elevated all the live-long day? Exact opposite to the French and heart disease prevalence is exactly opposite. I think it may be hyperinsulinemia more than anything. I wonder what cascades along with Insulin at full pace 24/7… anyone know? Surely the endocrine system is totally affected when insulin is continuously high?

Yeah, I think this is a very interesting possibility. So it is not only what foods you eat, but the timing as well. A related question I don’t quite understand is why was it that in my youth no one walked around with a bottle of water ever. Now, no one can go anywhere without bringing water.

This blog is very interesting not least for me since it is basically about my own “sickness” CVD. Also, it seems like almost all commentators here have experienced similar serious “sicknesses” and then it is also natural to get interested in the “understanding” what the “sickness” is all about.

This brings me to my present point.

To understand how I have been “fooled” by the health care system for almost twenty years now I have read many serious book reflecting my broad approach to the subject and with several book shelves overflowing. I have though a preference for books leaning towards philosophy since there is where you may find the “understanding”.

The one which now has “taken my heart” today is “STORIES of SICKNESS” by HOWARD BRODY. Already after 60 pages I realize that it brings a deeper understanding to why we are all here at Malcom’s blog with our own “stories” and that I think I can recommend the book the serious minded.

It is a pity that in English “Lead” the word we use to describe the heavy metal has so many other meanings. It makes searching on Google somewhat frustrating !

However a bit of searching tuned up this 21 page article, “Heavy Metal Poisoning and Cardiovascular Disease” in the Journal of Toxicology on the major heavy metal, arsenic, cadmium, Mercury etc. published in 2011

Charles Gale: Good question. My thoughts: Like all other cells, endothelial cells have a life span; when they finish their useful life, they are gobbled up and disposed of, to be replaced by Endothelial Progenitor Cells (this is my understanding anyway). This could be called part of the normal repair process. When an injury to the endothelium produces a blood clot, which becomes a plaque, a new layer of endothelium forms over it, putting the plaque inside the wall of the artery. This could be considered a pathological repair process. Or is it? Don’t most people have some level of plaque by old age? Do those who lack arterial plaque have especially good repair systems? Can plaques reduce or disappear by a normal repair process?

Gary Ogden according to some estimates our bodies are replaced with new cells in a span of 7 years. Some cells more rapidly and some not at all. What this implies is that your old plaque is replaced by new plaque if you continue with the same lifestyle and you are no better off.

Charles Gale, re. calcium scores. Calcification might have nothing to do with endothelial repair. Soft tissue calcification is not a repair mechanism, more likely a vitamin C, D3, K2 deficiency. Plaque is a soft tissue and a handy place to store excess calcium.

Interesting because it backs up the findings of EPIC-Norfolk (Kay-Tee Khaw) and a couple of large New Zealand studies (Ellley et al. and I think Morey et al.) which correlate A1c to CVD starting from genuinely nondiabetic levels of 5% and provides a potential mechanism.

OK further off topic but I also found this, I think on George Henderson’s twitter feed

might explain how statins actually work, when they do, but what else would reduce troponin?

Fascinating just how much science is now actually being published which does NOT put cholesterol front and centre of CVD and persuades other to look into other factors which may be more relevant.

The above discussions on wood burning are also interesting, they flashed me back to childhood when we and most everyone else used coal fires. One of our fires was a disaster because when the wind was in the wrong direction the smoke went up the chimney, down the adjacent chimney into my parents’ bedroom and cascaded back down the stairs, They had to use different chimney cowls to stop this occurring. Coal contains numerous chemicals including I think radioactive elements which would be escaping into the environment, probably not lead though.

chris, Warning:I am a consumer of medical information via google. My understanding of glycated hemoglobin: the mechanism of glucose damage is somewhere else.
“baseline troponin level” means that the molecule is produced and used on a regular basis. Troponin reduction by statins cannot be interpreted as reason for reduced CVD. Statins also affect inflammatory response and NO. Number needed to treat and number needed to harm with statins is a better indictor of their effectiveness.

These are fascinating interviews on the risk of lead poisoning from shot game meat. Topics include all-meat diet for carbohydrate intolerance, lead or red meat as causes of gout.https://t.co/z0ZeSTNazi

I have a friend who shoots, and know several farmers who raise pheasants and partridges as a “second crop” – plus the cover crops and seed feeders on the field margins support wild birds and small mammals so I regard them as ecologically beneficial.

Mostly, modern shot seems to go straight through the muscles and end up in the body cavity, but I just crunched down on a pellet in my current pheasant. I did spit it out quickly though, without breaking any teeth, but it was roasted in situ. I wonder how much harm it might do compared to the grains and industrially produced seed oils I no longer eat, or the pesticide residues on the veggies.

Apparently, in the 2000s it was noticed that about 40% of the sea eagle carcasses found in north eastern Germany had significant lead posioning, presumably because they had been eating carcasses that hunters left and they were more affected than foxes or boars.

What followed was the largest study worldwide to date, with 12000 animals surveyed and 5 PhD theses written. The findings mirrored smaller studies from Japan, the US and Canada.

Leads bullet do indeed break up into fragments, some of which are essentially vapor.

Copper seems to be a viable alternative and, contrary to what traditional hunters say, kills cleanly. Hunters also said copper was more toxic, which apparently is non-sense as traditional lead bullets are also copper coated.

Some states tried to ban lead bullets, to the opposition of some hunters, but today, in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, all state forests and most community forests are copper only.

Oh yes you just reminded me of something else, swans with drooping necks which were symptomatic of lead poisoning. In this case it was fishermen’s weights which they were picking up from the bottom of lakes and watercourses. I believe current fishing weights were switched to tungsten as a consequence. I wonder how much of that source of lead made it into drinking water for humans.

Also interesting how we require small quantities of numerous elements, like copper, selenium, vanadium, etc. which are highly toxic in overdose but essential, while I don’t think there is any requirement at all for lead, fluorine, et. which are toxic at all doses.

So far I have not made a single comment on the subject of CVD & d**t.
🙂
Dr K. Do you award elephant stamps ?
And the relationship betweenf Lead ( and heavy metals) seems well established. So why, why, why is testing for this not part of the GP response ?

Because GPs do nothing until an action is officially sanctioned by the ‘experts’. And the experts, currently, have no interest in heavy metals. Lag time between research and clinical action is usually about twenty years.

You say it is not carbs per se that is fattening. Please elaborate. Of course I understand you can gain weight on any food, but where am I wrong in the whole carbs/insulin/fat storage scenario?

You also say that you have read protein is most satiating and one can eat fat as easily as carbs. But I say from my own experience that fat is very satiating and carbs can be eaten almost nonstop. You can eat a huge bowl of rice, followed by slices of toast with jam. Try eating that amount of butter.

I will hold off on the protein. I can eat a lot of it if it is a delicious fresh roast.
Of course, heavy sugar is quite satiating as well. But just carbs in general, no.

AnnaM, most of the digestible carbs in our food break down into 3 simple sugars – glucose, fructose and galactose. Both fructose and galactose are absorbed and transported to the liver where they are converted to intermediates in glycolysis (oxidation of glucose to pyruvate/lactate) Glucose absorbed can either
– be broken down by cells in the body to generate ATP (glycolysis)
– stored as glycogen in liver or muscle
– used to generate 5 carbon sugars such as NADPH via the pentose phosphate
– conversion to fatty acids in the liver

The important point is that absorbed carbs only get converted to fat as a last resort. Between the muscle and liver they can store roughly 500 grams of glycogen which is a fair amount.

As I described earlier, insulin is but one hormone involved in energy homeostasis. It is an anabolic hormone that has many roles including the activation of glycogen synthesis and also production of muscle protein.

So when I say carbs per se aren’t fattening it means that you won’t start stacking on the adipose tissue the moment a carb passes your lips. However, like any macronutrient if you consume carbs you will gain weight over time.

Okay, but isn’t the storage of fat one of insulin’s main jobs? Of course that is not done until other uses are fulfilled, but that is the daily condition of many people I think. They rarely tap into their glycogen much. I suppose they might if they exercise, but they eat all day long. And overeat carbs.

AnnaM I guess when people continually refer to insulin as “the fat storage hormone” the mud eventually sticks. The main role of insulin is to help regulate blood glucose in a tight range…and it doesn’t do this by instantly coverting carbs to fat. It will use glucose for energy and replenish glycogen in liver and muscle before any lipogenesis occurs. It DOES inhibit the release of fatty acids from adipose tisse and CAN activate fatty acid synthesis,, but they are not its main role. Weight gain over time is due to overconsumption. I personally believe that carbs are easiest to overconsume…especially in liquid form. This can lead to the (incorrect) hypotheses that carbs (or the insulin levels in response) are uniquely fattening. The next bit gets back to WHY we overconsume, as posed by Martin Back earlier in the thread. I am going to leave that one alone. Cheers

Seriously though it has a LOT of different functions, and as a Master Hormone it has direct and indirect effects on a whole bunch of others. Pumping glucose into cells (and also vitamin C) via GLUT-4 receptors is only a small part of its game.

I am very far from alone in noticing that when I eat carbs I have to eat more carbs a few hours later. OTOH if I mostly stick to fats and proteins I can go hours without eating because I don’t get hungry, and conversely when I overreat it just takes longer before I get hungry again. At low (normal) insulin levels I have access to all the stored fat so it doesn’t stay stored for long. Taubes is not wrong, just oversimplified – but then a lot of information about leptin (for example) simply was not known when he wrote.

@chris c there is no doubt insulin is an anabolic hormone but where I have a problem is with phrases like insulin is the fat storage hormone. Yes, if you overconsume carbs to the point of filling glycogen stores fatty acid synthesis will ensue but the root cause is overconsumption. Taubes’ latest study proved that insulin response made no difference to fat loss/gain. I fully subscribe to the notion that carbs are easiest to overconsume, but overconsumption of fat would lead to the same outcome with respect to weight gain, despite the fact that insulin is substantially lower after a high fat low carb meal. There are lots of people who lose weight on low carb diets but that is because they have stopped overconsuming….not because of lower insulin/carbs. Cheers

Re your simple scenario of CO2, I wish you would go to my previous post, input the phrase into google that I suggested, and open and enlarge a couple of those graphs (they are all basically the same) and see what you make of it and of my questions.

Anna, I am familiar with those graphs. The problem is, the earth was different then, with a differing arrangement of continents and oceans.

Our current situation, with a continent surrounded by ocean at the south pole, and an ocean surrounded by continents at the north pole, has a unique response to temperature variations, which is probably responsible for the current ice-age/interglacial cycle. Further, given that the ocean currents are major players in global heat distribution, the closing of the gap between north and south America three million years ago would have substantially disturbed ocean currents and hence heat flows.

For these reasons I think we should be guided only by the most recent climate histories in our climate modelling, although knowing that Earth can veer between a snowball and a tropical paradise should make us cautious in our predictions.

Martin I suggest that the closing of the ocean gap between North & South America has Not had much impact on global climate.
However the movement of the continents South America & Australia Northwards, has had a mjor climate impact. This lead to the creation of the Antarctic circum polar current in the roaring 40’s & 50’s. That cold current has prevented any warm water currents moving Southwards & lead to Antarctica becoming completely icebound and glaciated.
Now this has been the case for the past 4-5 million years…In the time since then the planet has moved through a series and very cold glacial ice ages and then back to warmer inter glacials. At present we are in the midst of a warm inter glacial period…
Given that understanding, on past evidence the planet should, if left alone, probably move back towards a colder glaciated period.
However the release of lots of CO2 by burning fossil fuels throws a spanner into that natural climate cycle. And so the question becomes, is this a fortunate spanner for the humans living in Europe, Canada, Siberia etc. ?

Oh dear – I fear I am going against Dr K’s request to get back on topic. Malcolm, feel free to remove this post if you wish!

Martin,

The basic problem is that:

1) There is no analogy with a greenhouse, as I pointed out above. Venus is supposed to demonstrate runaway greenhouse warming, but there is evidence from the Magellan spacecraft that the real problem on Venus is that the atmospheric pressure at the surface is 92 times that on earth! As we all know temperatures rise as you descend through an atmosphere. That spacecraft also measured the temperatures in Venus’ atmosphere at the point where the pressure was just 1 earth atmosphere. The value was just 66C, yet the atmosphere is mainly CO2, and the planet gets about 4 times the solar radiation per square metre compared with Earth.

2) The 0.8 C rise in temperature since 1880 was known about before the climate change even began, and was attributed to some residual warming after the last ice age.

3) To the best of my knowledge, no actual experiment has been done to explore greenhouse warming theory. For example, it would not be impossible to fill a tall tube (say 1 mile high) with CO2 and observe if it gets hotter than it did when filled with air.

4) The real danger to the climate (apart from nuclear war) would be the start of the next ice age.

The tragedy is that we are all here because we realise that medical science has gone badly astray despite all the data from endless expensive studies. Hardly anyone stops and thinks, they just say “the doctors know best”.

It is incredible that after 50 years of research, a range of experts will give vastly different answers to the question, what causes CVD. Many here, stake their lives on the belief that conventional medicine has got it wrong. Scientists who debate by calling their opponents “Science Deniers” don’t deserve to be listened to – either in medicine or Climate!

Indeed it is, but the culprits are not who you think they are. The fossil fuel industry changed the debate from ‘global warming’, which one can prove is due to burning fossil fuels, to ‘climate change’, because we know the climate is continually changing, so who is to say the fossil fuel industry is responsible? They took a leaf from the tobacco industry’s playbook. By pointing out that people who don’t smoke also get lung cancer, the industry managed to cast doubt on tobacco’s culpability.

Regarding CO2, experience on submarines and the ISS suggests that 3000-plus ppm is not too high for humans. Of course, by the time we get there the climate and sea levels will have changed so much that breathing would be the least of our problems.

You ask about a damper in the flue. The stove has a lever which goes left to right to let in more or less air. Isn’t the flue the chimney or stove pipe?
Our weather is colder but it sounds like you do things similarly to us, except the trick of covering the night coals with ash. We often try to keep the fire going at night because of how cold it can get. We had many nights at more than 20 below by Celsius.

AnnaM, many installations used to have a flap inside the chimney, and operated by a lever on the side of the chimney. It sounds like you don’t have one. In your situation with temperatures of 20 below, I would have a masonry stove.They burn the wood fast, and then store the heat. The way I have improved the heat retention is to stack a layer of dense bricks against the sides and back of the stove. That acts as a poor mans storage heater. A proper masonry stove has to be build by a licenced person as they are serious bits of kit. It maybe you could build a Kakkleoven from a kit that would not need a tradesman.

AnnaM, wood stoves and CVD? There are benefits from cutting down trees, chopping firewood, mulching branches, digging up stumps, stacking/re-stacking woodpile, carrying wood to stove, cleaning ashes etc.. This is what I do and enjoy it as well.
From a study:
“The rural region, with the highest percentage of residential wood burning, also had substantial reductions in the burden of CVD and IHD among the elderly.”

AnnaM, I had a Waterford cast iron stove in our kitchen for 15 years. However the dense wood we burned resulted in high temperatures in the fire box which resulted in the cast iron distorting – buckling. The Waterford Irish stoves are made for burning dried peat I guess.
Then I discovered that there are kits available of fire bricks which can be installed inside the stove after removing the cast iron inner linings.. After I did that we never had a problem.And the stove retained a lot more heat as well.

Thanks for the reply Gary – makes sense to me. I think the analogy or comparison between arterial damage and plaque formation and skin damage and scab formation has been made on this website. Which works for me in trying to understand the complexities of all this.

My very simplistic take is that just as our skin cells die and fall off and get replaced constantly but when damaged (cut) then scabs form, so it is with our arteries.

Can plaques reduce or disappear? It seems there are those who say yes and those who say no. I’m not aware of anyone on this website who has tracked their plaque and reported back on their CAC scores. I had a calcium score done in Dec 2017 and intend to have another one in 2 years time.

I guess if the cause of the arterial damage has not been removed (or if you are in poor health thus hampering the body’s repair process), then plaque growth won’t reverse or halt and will continue to build.

Not sure why though – you would think that once the damaged part of the artery had been repaired (i.e. covered with plaque) that would be the end of the matter. But no – the plaque seems to build and build culminating in arterial blockage and sky high calcium scores.

Charles Gale: That (plaques continuing to grow) would imply repeated injury at the same spot combined with an under-performing repair system. How then to stop the repeated injury? How to improve the repair process? The $64,000 questions!

Please no one use this as an excuse to talk about breakfast, dinner and tea but “low carbohydrate diet” obviously means different things to different people. We know that while some mean avoidance of added sugar and processed food, others even avoid all fruits. If we really seriously avoid carbohydrates we must take in more fat. Otherwise the hormone glucagon, produced in the pancreas, must take an interest. And we know that glucagon acts as a stress hormone as well as a blood glucose raiser (reference earlier blogs). Even my dear 1968 text book “An Introduction to Human Physiology” (J.H. Green) has this to say of glucagon:
“It raises the blood glucose level probably by mobilising the liver glycogen in much the same way as does adrenaline.”
Yes, the HPA (Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenal) axis is in play. Yes? No?

To be sure, if you cut carbs you will have to eat fat. I recall a doctor telling a newly diagnosed diabetic to eat low carb and low fat. So the message that diabetics need to cut excess carbs has finally trickled down, but the horror of fat continues.

Andy I would say most of the digestible carbs/fats/protein would have long been absorbed before the gut bacteria get a chance to feed on them. If anything they turn indigestible matter into extra energy for us… example is short chain fatty acids.

Craig, 100 trillion gut bacteria must consume a fair amount of calories. Farmers use antibiotics to fatten cattle. Medications can affect gut microbiome and increase weight without consuming extra calories. Nutrition is not just about feeding the body, the gut bacteria requirements are also important. Their health impacts our health.
Apparently our gut buddies are fond of fermented vegetables.

Andy S it seems logical….gut flora are an area I have yet to delve into. Are you suggesting that gut flora snaffle (for want of a better word) some of the products of digestion before we absorb them (ie amino acids, simple sugars and fatty acids)? I always thought they feasted on indigestible carbohydrates.

Yes, this is fascinating. As I read all the alternative cancer stuff I can find, I jettisoned the mutation theory of cancer long ago. But there are a couple of more conflicting theories. A healing mechanism gone awry is one. Cellular reaction to lack of oxygen is another. There is also the microbial theory and in my opinion this is probably right. Actually, these theories are not mutually exclusive. Even the mutations are definitely real, I just don’t think they cause cancer but are the result of it. Cancer seems to act just like an infection would, just like a microbe would, in the way it spreads and the tricks it uses to evade the immune system and the way it adjusts and evolves to avoid things like chemo.

I fully subscribe to the role of lead on CVD, not least after reading the paper Malcom referred to and what Mercola recently brought up. What enters through our food in terms of “poisons” from modern agricultural practices is in my eyes also a “horror” as your country fellow man Andre Leu, author of the book “The Myths of Safe Pesticides,” explains in his book. I am today going organic as far as possible by the principle of “caution”.

Still there is a Popperian “refutation” that I can’t get around which inevitably relates to “diet”.

It is well known from what physicians reported more than hundred years ago by the first contacts with indigenous peoples from north to south that they could hardly find a single case of our modern “pandemic” diseases. Though the physicians also found that when these peoples adopted the European “diet” they experienced the same frequency of the diseases. The two items that have been singled out (not least by Taubes) as culprits are sugar and refined wheat flour. Evidently there was very little lead or poisons from agriculture at that time. A caveat is here that lead could have entered through the food stored in sealed tin cans.

Weston Price made the same observation when he, with impressive scientific rigor, roamed the world during the 1930th to visit and document all (the few remaining) peoples “not effected” by our modern processed food. He though believed that it was the absence of certain essential micro-nutrients in our food that was the cause of our “degeneration”.

Goran, your comment is fair enough and has some truth in it. And I recognise that diet does have an impact on our health. No point in denying it.
However DR K initiated this post with the discussion about LEAD and CVD. And it has a huge correlation even at low low levels in the blood. So I feel strongly that the discussion should focus on LEAD..
But it seems that even now some of us are focussed on diet…So I wonder about why that happens…

Turning to your remark about indigenous peoples : Here in Oz the last of the ‘un-contacted’ aborigines were rounded up in the desert regions from 1946-60’s as part of removing people from the Woomera rocket range and the UK atom bombs program testing areas. And those people were put on smal out of the way reservations and fed a diet of white flour, sugar, tea, bread and tinned meats as part of that process.

But they were also in new & close contact a range of industrial products which had lead in them. Like petrol, solder & tinned meats. A personal example I saw a few times : A car has run out of petrol.So when a second car turned up, the folks suck petrol out of the tank into a bottle to transfer it to the car which has run out…It was not seem as a poison and it should have been.

By the way, I met a new doctor today. I think I’m going to like her. She asked me whether I had high cholesterol and I said yes, around 240. (Cutoff is 200) She then looked it up and said, Oh, your good cholesterol is very high, so your high cholesterol is fine.

She’s a nice lady. I chose her because she runs her own practice. She had no hesitation in ordering an out of the way cancer marker test for me and I had asked two prior doctors, one an oncologist, if I could get it. One never got back to me (my GP) and the other said no I can’t do that and had not even a shred of interest in it. One of the benefits of living out here very rural, sometimes you get real salt-of-the-earth, personal treatment. I can tell that her staff are happy and love her.

How to stop repeated injuries? That is a tricky one – the tricky one – and I’ve had a futile job in trying to ascertain or prove the cause of my CVD incident and high calcium score. I guess if you can solidly identify the cause (e.g. high lead…mind matters such as stress) then you can take steps to stop or minimise the injury process.

How to improve the injury process? Plenty of suggested protocols out there (e.g. sufficient vitamin C). I suspect it’s a lifestyle thing e.g. my neighbour had a small hernia operation and was signed off work for 2 weeks for recovery. That turned into 7 weeks and he still has some seepage. The guy is overweight, a heavy smoker, lives on junk food and you’d need an environmental suit to enter his property – ankle deep in litter. I’m not surprised he hasn’t healed.

Ischemic stroke fixed before it can do serious damage by TPA?
Or is it too risky of a brain bleed to be used at all??
There seems to be emotional disagreement among the “experts”. Is the research flawed, or what?
Analyses? Opinions? Doc K??

Meanwhile, the vegan agenda is picking up steam. Telling people to have food without added salt, sugar or oil. And that’s also no meat, dairy or eggs. I’m sensing an agenda because it is getting so widespread and so many experts are saying this stuff as if it is proven with studies, but I know there is something wrong with their studies, I just don’t know what. And it’s like Low Fat 2.0. We were just climbing out, with more health care workers acknowledging that animal fats are okay and that carbs should be cut back, and with lots of books like good calories bad calories.

AnnaM, that link dates from 2010 – 8 years ago when ‘The China Study’ was published.Here is Oz there is more vegan propaganda about nowadays and recently a vegan cafe opened in my towns main street..

The vegan ‘demographic’ seems to be young, educated & female and aligns with Green party voters & it’s claims about the need to save the planet…But I have a suspician that this is just a stage in life for these people.

AnnaM: Yes Agenda 21 is real. It is a U.N. document which you can read on line. Also interesting are the founding documents of WHO, which was founded to reduce world population. They established an agency called Planned Parenthood (which I think is a different organization from the current one), with Bill Gates, Sr. as its head. I’m not making this up.

Sometimes I have trouble finding the dates on things internet. But even if it is 8 years old, doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant, especially when we’re talking about the unfolding cultural influences which take years and decades. I am confused on the population control aspect of the agenda. There was a strong push for birth control such as Planned Parenthood back in the 70s. And it is a pretty sure thing that if birth control is made available to poor women, they will reduce their birth rate. But somehow the whole media coverage and actual availability of birth control has taken a back burner and I don’t know why.

My main point is that I am seeing a renewed push for rather extreme veganism right on top of the new knowledge that is also coming out that fat and cholesterol are not bad, and that excess carbs are probably really bad. Maybe, like politics, it is becoming another area of societal polarization!

And of course there is a lot of lying. Emotional appeals. So if they have to lie, why are they doing it?

AnnA, As I understand it, the birth control was doing well until it was scuppered by the “rights of a woman to have as many children as she wanted” movement. This had the effect of stopping governments funding the project, or the politicians would be vilified as potential killers.

Below is posted elsewhere and I think sums up the current situation:

Boring history for those new to glyphosate’s many benifits:

Invented as a pipe cleaner
Morphed to a herbicide by monsanto
Patented as an antibiotic (presumably just in case there was money to be made from it).

And you can buy it on Amazon. I’m surprised Bill Gates isn’t recommending it for direct injections, great for population reduction.

Quote World banker calls for population reduction by sickness and glyphosate enters the market soon thereafter
Before glyphosate became the monster agricultural necessity that it is today, it was used as a scaling agent to clean lime and other water deposits from industrial pipes. By 1970, an organic chemist working for Monsanto, John E. Franz, discovered that glyphosate is a powerful herbicide. Two years later, World Bank head Robert McNamara made a statement supporting population control, published in the French Magazine J’ai Tout Compris.

He said, “One must take draconian measures of demographic reduction against the will of the populations. Reducing the birth rate has proved to be impossible or insufficient. One must therefore increase the mortality rate. How? By natural means. Famine and sickness.”

Just two years after that, glyphosate research received major funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and entered the commercial market through Monsanto, quickly becoming an agricultural boon.

Glyphosate’s perceived benefit of increasing crop yields overshadowed its dark side of destroyed soil microbiology and human gut microbes. From then on, the Western world entered a time of rapidly expanding disease, as cheap, chemical-laden foods filled diets.

Quote:What they fail to mention is that the shikimate pathway is present in human gut bacteria. Most importantly, these bacteria possess an integrated biosemiotic relationship with the human host, aiding in digestion, gastrointestinal tract permeability, synthesis of vitamins, detoxification of xenobiotics and overall immune system homeostasis.

So, as glyphosate depletes this microbiology, they are essentially destroying the human race from the inside out — ever so silently. Why is this not reported by the manufacturers, the government or the mainstream media?

Bill, wow, I thought it almost impossible to get a cast iron stove to warp. I have had a steel stove turn red in high heat but not warp. Are you sure it was cast iron? Anyway, we try not to let it get over about 600 degrees. God only knows what that might be in Celsius. The Norwegian Jotul meets all EPA requirements without a catalytic converter and has no firebrick.

AnnaM, we were burning a Eucalyptus species called “Yellow Box” ( Eucalyptus melliadora )..It is a very heavy dense wood.It is so dense that even the white ants/termites leave it alone and so it is used for fence posts and house foundations, as well as fire wood in the country areas where it grows. And the temperature in the oven often got up round 600 degrees F. when we burned that wood. Installing the fire brick kits took a couple of days as I did a total clean out of all the various inside bits and the flue as well.But it worked like a charm afterwards.

The article didn’t say much. I had heard that antifungals pulled some children out of leukemia. But I am skeptical that human cells can ‘revert’ to a fungal state. I certainly don’t know enough about biology to say that this isn’t possible. It seems rather more likely that cells can get infected by much smaller organisms, causing the various characteristics of cancer. I find the spread of cancer particularly unlike what we would expect from a cell that had simply mutated so that it loses its apoptosis.

Anna, “transformation” could be substituted for “revert”, but the end result would be the same. Need a better understanding what created dysfunctional mitochondria, they appear to be central players in most diseases. For a cell to obtain energy by fermenting glucose appears to be more primitive.

KEY POINTS:
We recently found that feeding healthy mice a diet with reduced levels of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), which are associated with insulin resistance in both humans and rodents, modestly improves glucose tolerance and slows fat mass gain. In the present study, we show that a reduced BCAA diet promotes rapid fat mass loss without calorie restriction in obese mice. Selective reduction of dietary BCAAs also restores glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity to obese mice, even as they continue to consume a high-fat, high-sugar diet. A low BCAA diet transiently induces FGF21 (fibroblast growth factor 21) and increases energy expenditure. We suggest that dietary protein quality (i.e. the precise macronutrient composition of dietary protein) may impact the effectiveness of weight loss diets.

ABSTRACT:
Obesity and diabetes are increasing problems around the world, and although even moderate weight loss can improve metabolic health, reduced calorie diets are notoriously difficult to sustain. Branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs; leucine, isoleucine and valine) are elevated in the blood of obese, insulin-resistant humans and rodents. We recently demonstrated that specifically reducing dietary levels of BCAAs has beneficial effects on the metabolic health of young, growing mice, improving glucose tolerance and modestly slowing fat mass gain. In the present study, we examine the hypothesis that reducing dietary BCAAs will promote weight loss, reduce adiposity, and improve blood glucose control in diet-induced obese mice with pre-existing metabolic syndrome. We find that specifically reducing dietary BCAAs rapidly reverses diet-induced obesity and improves glucoregulatory control in diet-induced obese mice. Most dramatically, mice eating an otherwise unhealthy high-calorie, high-sugar Western diet with reduced levels of BCAAs lost weight and fat mass rapidly until regaining a normal weight. Importantly, this normalization of weight was mediated not by caloric restriction or increased activity, but by increased energy expenditure, and was accompanied by a transient induction of the energy balance regulating hormone FGF21 (fibroblast growth factor 21). Consumption of a Western diet reduced in BCAAs was also accompanied by a dramatic improvement in glucose tolerance and insulin resistance. Our results link dietary BCAAs with the regulation of metabolic health and energy balance in obese animals, and suggest that specifically reducing dietary BCAAs may represent a highly translatable option for the treatment of obesity and insulin resistance.

– Your body needs BCAAs to function properly but is unable to make them, so dietary intake is essential.
– BCAAs are present in all protein-containing foods.
– Red meat and dairy foods are the richest sources of branched-chain amino acids. This includes beef, bison, lamb, goat, cheese, milk and yogurt.

I don’t think your experiment #3 would be a good one. It seems to simple. In the atmosphere, there is something about a band in which CO2 can exert its effects, sort of like receptor sites in cells, that when they are used up CO2 can no longer act as a greenhouse gas.

Martin Back,
You say that at 3000 ppm breathing will be the least of our problems. But how do you account for life thriving at 7000 ppm in the past?

Well even if my suggested experiment is unsuitable, I think it needs discussing, because as I said, a moment’s thought tells you that greenhouses do not work in the way stated. Of course, CO2 is present at all levels of the atmosphere.
Remember that Venus is usually described as having a runaway greenhouse effect, but really it hasn’t once you correct for the much greater atmospheric pressure at the surface! Its CO2 will be diffused throught its atmosphere.
With two big planks of the case for GW demolished, I would need to see someone starting by admitting and explaining the mistakes regarding Venus, and the behaviour of real greenhouses, and then reconstructing a case for this effect being nevertheless real, before I would ever believe that global warming is even real, never mind dangerous.

I imagine the physics Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever, who spoke about global warming (see my previous link), must have been inundated with attempts to change his mind (at least if there are scientists who genuinely believe he is wrong, as opposed to exposing an embarrassing truth), and his video lecture still stands on the internet!
Ivar Giaever is far from the only scientist who objects to this theory, but they are branded as “Science Deniers” and given little or no chance to expound their views at conferences.

Hi Randall—I’m not an authority on this topic in any sense, though I am very interested in energy metabolism. One thing I know is that we humans are omnivores. Also, the human body is extremely complicated, and many descriptions of how it works are simplistic. When we consume carbohydrates they travel to the small intestine where they are converted to glucose. From there the glucose does not go into the general arterial blood flow, but is sent to the liver. The liver will use the glucose for energy, and also convert as much as it can into longer term storage as glycogen (app.100 grams). When the liver is saturated it will release the glucose directly to the heart—again without going into the general circulation. The heart doesn’t store much glucose as glycogen, it always needs glucose or ketones (starvation). After this circuit is complete the glucose goes into the general blood stream where our muscles will take up as much as possible for use and storage as glycogen (app. 350-500 grams). The first time the pancreas is exposed to the glucose is at this time of release to the general blood stream.

However, the brain is dominant here:

Lead author Sabrina Diano, a professor at Yale School of Medicine in the US, stated that, “We have discovered that the prolyl endopeptidase enzyme — located in a part of the hypothalamus known as the ventromedial nucleus — sets a series of steps in motion that control glucose levels in the blood.”

The ventromedial nucleus contains cells that are glucose sensors. To understand the role of prolyl endopeptidase in this part of the brain, the researchers used mice that were genetically engineered with low levels of this enzyme.

They found that in absence of this enzyme (prolyl endopeptidase), mice had high levels of glucose in the blood and became diabetic. The enzyme is important because it makes the neurons in this part of the brain sensitive to glucose.

The neurons sense the increase in glucose levels and then tell the pancreas to release insulin, which is the hormone that maintains a steady level of glucose in the blood, preventing diabetes.

“Because of the low levels of endopeptidase, the neurons were no longer sensitive to increased glucose levels and could not control the release of insulin from the pancreas, and the mice developed diabetes,” Diano added.

Generally metabolic problems are not caused primarily by a certain macronutrient, but by chronic energy imbalance. IMHO

“Putting this another way : 13.3% of ALL deaths in the USA are caused by Lead exposure.”

Analogous to Malcolm’s observations about ‘lives saved’ by taking statins, Isn’t this a case where deaths is the wrong unit of measurement, and the real statistic would be person-years of life lost due to lead exposure?

“Certain gut bacteria, for example, trigger inflammations in our immune systems, while other bacteria secrete substances that infiltrate our blood or clog arteries, which may help explain why humans with heart disease host very different microbial communities than those with healthy hearts.

I sent a message on March 23, 8:43pm concerning “Group Think” which I feel is a good explanation of many of the actions of the “medical industry” which are discussed on your blog, and may interest your contributors, but so far it hasn’t appeared. Did you miss it, or forbid its entry?? It’s still shown on my PC as awaiting moderation.

Hi Bill
Herein lies your answer regarding why folk are so fixated and keep reverting to the discussion on diet, it is practically the only thing we lay folk have any control over. What we put into our mouths is up to us to keep us healthy we hope. In a world where big business, big grocery, big soda, big pharma big farming and big brother keep shifting the goal posts where we have no control about air, lead exposure, water, and ‘best health practices’ constantly trying to keep folk both compliant and quiet we have probably all had the experience of querying something with a doctor and seen that little smile (you have been told all you need to know). It is a very interesting list I can tick more than you can but how do we know where we might be exposed, and what to do about it as Dr K stated earlier heavy metals are not on the radar. I guess the fact that we have now been given a heads up might help us if we suspected lead may be an issue for us and if Medicare/NHS does not cover the cost of the tests outside known areas of lead exposure we could request a private referral to a path lab and pay for it ourselves (I have no idea if this would be covered by the public system but any GP would know the answer).

Bill in Oz: I just picked up from the health food store Arizona Natural Chelation Formula. Only one ingredient: Calcium Disodium EDTA, 600 mg. Just took one with the vitamin C water. How often do you take it, and how much?

Bill in Oz: Today (April 8) Mark’s Daily Apple has a link to lots of interesting information about EDTA chelation of heavy metals in regard to CVD (including the TACT trial, which was designed to discredit it, but instead validated it). Near the bottom of the post, under Time Capsule, One year ago, click “How to Augment and Support Your Natural Detox Capacities.” One of the papers says the IV dose of 2g once a week has no side effects, but 6g does. I wonder how this relates to the oral dose. My capsules have 0.6g, so three days would be approaching 2g. The paper also says EDTA chelates Al.

I had a black girlfriend who used to apply skin-lightening cream to her face, and shortly afterwards it got applied to my face too.

I tried to dissuade her because I liked her just the colour she was, but it was a strongly cultural thing.

I was horrified to find the ingredients included lead (acetate I think, water soluble) and also a chemical I used to use as a photographic developer which required the use of rubber gloves. Worse still this stuff was made in the UK and exported.

The scientists, working in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin, hope their discovery will have relevance for inflammatory and infectious diseases — and that their findings may also help to develop much-needed new drugs to treat people living with these conditions.

Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity, Luke O’Neill, was, along with Dr Mike Murphy of the University of Cambridge, the joint leader of the work just published in leading international journal Nature. The discoveries were made using both human cells and mice as a model organism.

Professor O’Neill said: “My lab has been exploring metabolic changes in macrophages for the past six years and we’ve come across what we think is the most important finding yet.”

“It is well known that macrophages cause inflammation, but we have just found that they can be coaxed to make a biochemical called itaconate. This functions as an important brake, or off-switch, on the macrophage, cooling the heat of inflammation in a process never before described.”

Dr Evanna Mills, who, with Dylan Ryan was joint first author of the work, said: “The macrophage takes the nutrient glucose, whose day job it is to provide energy, and surprisingly turns it into itaconate. This then blocks production of inflammatory factors, and also protects mice from the lethal inflammation that can occur during infection.”

Dylan Ryan added: “We’ve found that itaconate can directly modify a whole host of proteins important for inflammation in a chemical reaction never before described, and that this reaction is important for the anti-inflammatory effects of itaconate.”

The discovery is very much on the frontier of inflammation research and Professor O’Neill and his collaborators are now exploring its relevance to the onset and development of inflammatory and infectious diseases. They are also keen to explore whether the findings can be exploited in the effort to develop new anti-inflammatory medicines.

The work was a collaboration with Harvard Medical School, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Dundee, and GlaxoSmithKline, where both Professor O’Neill and Dr Mills spent time on sabbatical.

Professor O’Neill said: “This discovery and the new research pathways it has opened up will keep us busy for some time but we are hopeful that it will one day make a difference to patients with diseases that remain difficult to treat.”

The work was funded by The Wellcome Trust, Science Foundation Ireland, the European Research Council and GlaxoSmithKline.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Trinity College Dublin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Sounds like another attempt to make money by treating symptoms rather than the underlying disease…. as usual.
I wonder what they had to do to the mice to get them to exhibit the high levels of inflammation? feed them lots of omega6 perhaps?

For those here interested in the reduced life span of the poor in Scotland, especially in the West of Scotland around Glasgow, here is an interesting discussion by Sir harry Burns with yes our favorite ogre Norman Swan…

Burns states it is NOT diet that reduces lifespan and incrreaes heart disease and cancer. rates among the poor..And he also says he has never seen a deep fried Mars Bar !…But the post war loss of community with bulldozing the tenements and slums, and scattering people in high rises and new towns, has had a major impact…

Actually it is in my home town Trollhättan at a big supermarket. It is the variant Oncorhynchus gorbuscha and 140 million (about a kg a piece without the head and entrails) are caught every year in a sustainable certified way in Alaska.

We actually made a delicious Swedish favorite “gravlax” on one of them for the Eastern Holiday.
(In the prize lecture of professor Unger, with his Swedish connections, he specifically praise his host professor Rolf Luft for his home made “gravlax” before digging into the details of blood sugar control through the action of the hormone glucagon.)

Forgive me now for linking to this lecture another time but it is irresistibly excellent, well revolutionary, to me.

How old is that Vit D study though? The references given are no newer than 2011. There seems to be an alternative view that D supplementation will increase calcium which will distort the balance between iron and copper (unbound iron) that is concerning. This from Morley Robbins et al.

With my 4 000 IU D3/day since some years now I feel like I am on the right track.

I wonder though about my high intake of natural vitamin E which keeps my angina in check. Could it be a synergy?

Anyway all my muscles (including my heart) are working excellently and the wood chopping proceeds nicely. The first truckload and a part of the second are now turned into firewood and nicely stacked waiting for warm summer weather to dry up.

My basic stand is to keep as fara away from the NHS as possible. You give them a finger and they will for sure grab the whole hand.

The last time , three years ago, when I was “curious” about my unstable angina, the cardiologist made his best to steam roll me as flat as he possibly could and he actually used his whole hand to point at me while prescribing his standard set of five “heart medicines” although all test results were perfect. All the time he knew that I would never touch any drugs (I had stayed away from them for fifteen years by then) but stil he couldn’t resist calling me afterwards to check if I had been at the pharmacy. Realizing the uselessness of further contacts I arrived, through my own “research” at the natural vitamin E as a remedy which seems to work nicely.

BTW I am now facing the last ten trunks of the second truckload and have begun on my fourth and last stack of firewood. Spring is now here in Sweden and i can work in a T-shirt.

Göran
I am amazed and inspired by your woodchopping. Dare I ask if you are using á power splitter.
Michel de Lorgeril a French statin and saturated fat sceptic, and author of the Lyons heart trial, reckons that unless you are obviously I’ll, you should avoid CAC measuring and ultrasounds of the carotid arteries, on the grounds that testing is stressful, enriches the testers, and exposes you to statin pushers.
You seem to be doing very well as you are, and I look forward to your book.

I notice that the American Heart Association are now no longer quoting absolute recommneded TC level ranges (quote form their web page):

“You may be used to hearing about numerical ranges for total cholesterol. For many years they were widely publicized. Nowadays, these ranges aren’t used. Instead, total cholesterol levels are considered in context with other risk factors, and treatment is recommended accordingly.”

Does this mark the start of a gradual retrenchment for the ridiculous cholesterol hypothesis?

I understand that the medical profession faces a difficult time to back out of this whilst trying to save face!

Of course the obvious question remains “What has changed, why was TC important yesterday and not today?” The biology hasn’t changed. I think we know the answer but it will never be admitted.

It is interesting and good to see something starting to think off the beaten track. However, it fails to explain many things e.g. why no atherosclerosis in veins – which have far more VV than arteries.

Thank you for this “reminder” of an alternative hypothesis for plaque formation.

Uffe Ravnskov and McCully wrote an interesting paper about microbes infecting artery walls through the incorporated thin blood vessels (Vasa vasorum) and not least on the action of the LDL as a part of our immune system when binding to microbes.

Neil
I read this link. Would you care to explain in lay persons English what it means ? Too much jargon for me to take in though it’s clear that this surgeon is perplexed by what he actually sees when he operates.

He wonders why atherosclerotic plaques only appear in certain places. Some arteries are full of plaque, others have none. This never seems to bother the ‘experts’ in cardiovascular medicine in the slightest, but it is a fundamental question. He feels it is due to blockage of the vasa vasosrum (the blood vessels that supply blood to the larger blood vessels). Uffe Ravnskov has a similar idea, but I do not think that either of them are right. Whilst there is no doubt that the vasa vasorum VV have a part to play in plaque development, I believe their role is actually to try to ‘heal’ plaques, and maintain nutrient supply to compromised areas of the artery wall. Finding lots of new VV in association with plaque is, in my opinion, like finding new collateral circulation in the heart when the coronary arteries are severely narrowed. This is the heart trying to keep itself alive, and the collateral circulation does not precede the development of coronary artery plaques, it comes afterwards.

The problem with his argument is that he is doing the usual medical thing. Finding an abnormality, then believing that the abnormality must be the ’cause of’, rather than ’caused by,’ the underlying process. In the vernacular, he has grabbed the wrong end of the stick. To his credit, he has a least recognised that there is a stick to grab hold of.

One obvious difference between veins and arteries is the blood pressure they are exposed to. Veins are thinner because pressure is practically zero. Not much can go wrong in this steady state environment. High glucose can damage all cells in any tissue.
Hypoxia/angiogenesis at a cellular level creates thick arteries, then other factors come into play: smooth muscle cell migration, accumulation of lipid droplets, fatty streaks, inflammation etc..A growing plaque then needs more capillaries via vasa vasorum. The blood clots come later.

Lead will displace calcium in mitochondria and accelerate apoptosis of all cells including endothelial cells. The low fat diet with PUFA is not the answer to CVD.

Thank you for the explanation Dr K…. Now comes my time for thinking about it… And also your own thoughts on this surgeon’s article. I agree with your comment that he has certainly found the stick..And that is a step forward..

Hi Neil, the surgeon’s conclusion “Blood vessel walls of our species require external blood supply, with more VV probably being better than less. Their augmentation could be a field of future research in regenerative medicine” . This reasoning is based on thin air.
VV serves a useful function until it becomes dysfunctional then more VV does not help, it becomes the problem.

Dr. K. a clogged artery could be the end result of something gone wrong not the starting point. Hypoxia or a cell toxin might be a place to look for a starting point. A distressed cell will communicate with other cells and attempt to recruit assistance for damage control.

Ted, re. VV angiogenesis. The authors’ conclusion is to develop drugs to prevent angiogenesis thereby reducing CVD. Another approach would be to understand what causes endothelial dysfunction that precipitates angiogenesis. Here is a reference to a paper that puts the blame on free radicals:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3831119/
The Vascular Endothelium and Human Diseases
“Several factors that can increase the number of free radicals in the body including obesity, smoking, sleep deprivation, acute microbial infections, high glucose intake, and exposure to metals and air pollutants.”

Glucose is higher in an artery than a vein. I believe glucose damages the endothelial cells. Levels are higher in the arterial blood because some of the glucose diffuses from the plasma to interstitial fluid (IF) as blood circulates through the capillary system. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2903977/

You may find, if you look at the anatomy of the vasculature that the highest blood glucose concentrations will be found in the veins going from the gut to the liver, and from the liver into the main circulation. The hepatic portal vein and the hepatic vein will be exposed to the highest concentrations of blood sugar. The blood from the portal vein will then go directly to the heart, via the superior vena cave, and through the lungs. So the pulmonary blood vessels will be exposed to a higher concentration of sugar than the rest of the body. Atherosclerosis does not develop in pulmonary blood vessels.

You will find, though, the the concentration of blood sugar in arteries and veins is, to all intents and purposes, identical.

Dr. K. high blood glucose will be bad for veins, arteries and capillaries, the VV connection. High glucose affects vitamin C uptake by all cells resulting in a modern version of scurvy, a quick way to destroy endothelium and develop plaque in arteries. Leaking capillaries and veins is an overlooked problem. Adding more vit C to high glucose does not help, go low carb.

In the new study, researchers looked at vitamin D levels in 43 people with type 2 diabetes and in 25 others who were similar in age, sex and body weight but didn’t have diabetes. They found that in diabetes patients with low vitamin D — less than 30 nanograms per milliliter of blood — the macrophage cells were more likely to adhere to the walls of blood vessels, which triggers cells to get loaded with cholesterol, eventually causing the vessels to stiffen and block blood flow. https://source.wustl.edu/2012/11/vitamin-d-prevents-clogged-arteries-in-diabetics/

I was aware of the aerotoxic debate, but not of the link to heart disease stated in this article. The debate is quite strong in the UK and Oz due to the prevalence of the Avro / BAE regional jet, a somewhat spleeny British design that put four engines on a rather small plane, and RR engines used on Boeing and Airbus plantes that have a triple spool core, i.e. one more seal to leak oil.

Dr Kendrick cannot provide individual patient advice over the Internet. UK General Medical Council regulations are clear that to do so would be a breach of medical standards that could result in disciplinary proceedings.

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